IME that's true until around 250 lines or so (this one is 500+). Then you've passed the point where "rewrite it in something more scalable / testable / maintain

IME that's true until around 250 lines or so (this one is 500+). Then you've passed the point where "rewrite it in something more scalable / testable / maintainable" can easily be done, and you start having endless iterations of "it needs to be rewritten but I just want this one feature added so we'll do the rewrite later." And heaven help you if the script changes owners, gets additional owners, or you have to pick it up again after ignoring it for a year. That's not to say the above doesn't happen with other languages/systems. It most certainly does. It just seems to happen faster in shell (especially when people start getting adventuresome in their use of fancy shell features).