[robertlagrant]

At that point you're far beyond a bash script alternative though, aren't you?

[ComputerGuru]

Not necessarily. Shell scripts often embody the unix “do one thing and do it right” principle. To download a file in a bash script you wouldn’t (sanely) source a bash script that implements an http client;, you would just shell out to curl or wget. Same for parsing a json file/response: you would just depend on and defer to jq. Whereas in python you could do the same but most likely/idiomatically would pull in the imports to do that in python.

It’s what makes shell scripts so fast and easy for a lot of tasks.

[robertlagrant]

Fair enough, although in your examples Python comes with JSON support, but not a (very usable) HTTP client, and Bash has the reverse problem.

I would like it if Python just had a sane nice HTTP client built in, but it can also just shell out to curl.