One thing I appreciate about this talk is that it emphasizes "the shell is not a general purpose language, it's a special purpose language for running commands"

One thing I appreciate about this talk is that it emphasizes "the shell is not a general purpose language, it's a special purpose language for running commands". I see a lot of people complaining about shell and wanting to replace all shell uses with other languages like python or ruby. Yet when you try to do that, you often end up with long sequences of code that shell can do in a few much clearer lines. Invoking a command is trivial in shell, that is what it is optimized to do. Shell is good for some things, and terrible for others... just like any other programming language.