[barrkel]

When I write scripts, I often need to execute programs written in different languages. Writing such scripts in a languages like Python and Ruby is very clumsy.

Whereas the scripts I write in Ruby tend to rely heavily on a bunch of gems that add enormously to startup time. These scripts also often end up as stages in a pipeline executed from bash.

Fork/join shared-nothing parallelism is also very easy to do in bash, and is how I normally use more cores to get jobs done more quickly.