[kylemaxwell]

>feels too much like piecing together jigsaw puzzles where you first have to know which pieces actually exist.

Well... that describes programming in many ways. That's not to say that shell scripting is the perfect casual programming environment - in fact, it certainly isn't! - but that anyone dabbling in things will certainly come to feel that problem. When I hacked in BASIC thirty years ago, then moved to Pascal, and then to C, that's largely how I felt the whole time.