Maybe shell makes sense to you, but I recently wrote my first real shell script and it was nothing but pain. Brackets don't mean what you think they mean. 'If'

Maybe shell makes sense to you, but I recently wrote my first real shell script and it was nothing but pain. Brackets don't mean what you think they mean. 'If' does not work sometimes? and I am not sure why. Sometimes I am supposed to quote variables but not always? And after all that it broke once it moved to a AIX machine since it was not POSIX compliant. Maybe it's obvious to you, but when I cannot even figure out if an if statement will work, something is horribly wrong. I don't even use python and I can just about guarantee it's easier for someone who knows neither.