If you're targeting a limited set of systems and can reasonably assume the requirements won't change in the future, obviously use whatever tools you know will b

If you're targeting a limited set of systems and can reasonably assume the requirements won't change in the future, obviously use whatever tools you know will be available. I write Bash and Python all the time for those reasons. But it's silly to think that there's nothing in between "complete control over target environment" and "use ANSI C so it can be compiled to any architecture and platform under the Sun." POSIX compliance will cover a lot. Try browsing /usr/bin on any Unix system you'll see plenty of use cases. I just looked at /usr/bin on my laptop and saw that mysqld_safe is a Bourne shell script, for just one example.