Line-oriented pipelines are great and have their place but I'm still sticking to a high-level general purpose programming language (lets abbreviate this as HGPP

Line-oriented pipelines are great and have their place but I'm still sticking to a high-level general purpose programming language (lets abbreviate this as HGPPL) for scripts longer than 10 lines, because the following reasons: * I like to the HGPPL data structures and convenient library for manipulating them (in my case this is Clojure which has a great core library). Bash has indexed and associative arrays. * Libraries for common data formats are also used in a consistent way in the HGPPL. I don't have to remember a DSL for every data format - i.e. how to use jq when dealing with JSON. Similarly for YAML, XML, CSVs, I can also do templating for configuration files for nginx and so on. I've seen way too many naive attempts to piece together valid YAML from strings in bash to know its just not worth doing. * I don't want to switch programming language from the main application and I find helps "break down silos" when everyone can read and contribute to some code. If a team is just sysadmins - sure, make bash the official language and stick to it. * I can write scripts without repeating myself using namespaces and higher-order functions, which my choice of paradigm for abstractions, others write cleanly with classes. You can follow best practices, avoid the use of ENV vars, but that requires extra discipline and it is hard to enforce on other for the type of places where bash is used.