Last week I wrote a bash script that ended up being about 250 lines. It was mostly running other processes. For technical reasons, it needed to re-invoke itself

Last week I wrote a bash script that ended up being about 250 lines. It was mostly running other processes. For technical reasons, it needed to re-invoke itself a few times via sudo. When I was done I looked over it and thought: this is a nice piece of code right now. It's well documented. It's self contained. It passes my tests. I could maintain this code. But it made use of quite a few bash'isms: arrays and so forth. I wasn't confident in the ability of my colleagues to keep it in good state. So I rewrote it in Python. The Python version ended up being a little longer, but that was mostly due to formatting difference. The Python version in addition I could reformat with black and isort, I added type annotations so I could test it with mypy. (I had formatting the shell version with shfmt and checked it with shellcheck, but still.) The Python version is much easier to read, and I think will be more maintainable. I consider myself competent in both languages so it's a courtesy to my colleagues if nothing else to ship the Python version.