I agree with the DevOps theory, but precisely for the opposite reason. People wrote all kinds of automated tools etc. to replace weird BOFH shell scripts. Almos

I agree with the DevOps theory, but precisely for the opposite reason. People wrote all kinds of automated tools etc. to replace weird BOFH shell scripts. Almost no syntactical improvements upon Bourne sh (which was a weird Algol-like in C-land), but introducing plenty of incompatibilities because other systems might have just regular sh or an older version of bash. Compared to Korn Shell or yes, Perl, it's a major step back. (I'd also say it's a lot harder to write than read, given that once you're reading a working script, you've already got most of the whitespace issues and badly formed command argument worked out). The Unix commandline as a way to pipe together commands was a pretty great idea. But every inch you step away from that abstract ideal is just mired in a geological accumulation of oddities and bad design (Plan 9 probably being the closest ever attempt of making that work less painfully)