[rhizome]

I feel that the days of a shell being used for scripting are past.

I've noticed this attitude among those who tend to use sysadmin-minimizing features of the internet, such as cloud hosting. There's still a whole world of real server out there, though.

[xolox]

I get what you're saying but have to say that since I've started doing more deployments in AWS I'm writing more and more shell scripts. Any given Linux AMI will support Bash and even though shell scripts are painful to write and maintain, doing the equivalent in e.g. Python is painful as well :-(

[ramLlama]

That is true. I do minimal system administration, so that is not a concern for me.

I tend to use a shell for system interaction more than scripting. In that regard, I give more importance to interactivity enhancements. On the other hand, I have found myself using bash to automate simple things in our company testbed. As soon as I need a datastructure more than an array, or recursive functions, I jump to lua.

If your primary job is to be a sysadmin, then Bash is Required Reading.

[ralph]

I disagree. As a programmer I can represent inputs and outputs as text and write code to do intended transformations. As a quick ad hoc test I can easily knock up a shell pipeline to give confidence in those results, even if it would be too slow for production. There's many occasions when powerful shell usage is quicker to write than Python, etc.

My comment in reply to http://www.iheartchaos.com/post/16393143676/fun-with-math-di... is one example.