I'd split your first point in two: - Shell scripting for running commands and managing files - Unix utilities for processing text These happen to complement

I'd split your first point in two: - Shell scripting for running commands and managing files - Unix utilities for processing text These happen to complement each other nicely. It's not that bash is better at manipulating text than Python, it's that Python makes it painful to invoke commands (like those Unix utilities) and pipe data between them (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17733865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17733865 ).