I wrote a small book on the shell, and I have no idea why anyone would prefer Bash as a scripting language. Or as a shell interpreter, for that matter. Sometime

I wrote a small book on the shell, and I have no idea why anyone would prefer Bash as a scripting language. Or as a shell interpreter, for that matter. Sometimes one lacks alternatives, and sometimes the Bash version of some task is too simple not to use. I feel like there's a cadre of developers who used Bash, Perl, and Unix in the mid-90s - early naughties, to excellent effect, but have resisted learning anything else since, in the mistaken belief that these tools were appropriate solutions to all classes of problem. And not to say that shell scripts are bad, just that the range of tasks for which they are best suited is far more restrictive then people seem to think. A friend surprised me by saying that Bash was an essential part of his genetics research, and after being initially shocked, the idea made rather a lot of sense: genetic data is semi-structured text, and much of his work involved transforming the output of one program to the input of another. Outside of such applications, I view the use of Bash as non-optimal at best.