[sgarland]

Sad that you're being downvoted for the truth.

Unless you're doing some extremely niche work, Bash >= 3.2 (because Mac) is nearly always going to be available. Even if it _isn't_, there will still be sh or dash, and it's not _that_ hard to stick with pure POSIX for most small uses.

The last time I (by which I mean my team) rewrote a script from Bash into Python was because it had gotten unwieldy over time, I was the sole maintainer, and very few other people at the company knew Bash well enough to understand some of it. The upside was testing frameworks in Python are way better than Bash.

[MathMonkeyMan]

First you write in shell without knowing the language, and blow your foot off. A few years go by. "I should use a _real_ language, I'm not an amateur anymore." So you write everything in Python. A few years go by. "I should learn shell, and use it only when appropriate."

Maybe this is what Perl is for, but I never learned it.