As a counterpoint, I'd peg its ubiquity as the only advantage for someone who isn't primarily a sysadmin and already knows Python, Ruby or Perl (and surely othe

As a counterpoint, I'd peg its ubiquity as the only advantage for someone who isn't primarily a sysadmin and already knows Python, Ruby or Perl (and surely others). The latter produce much more maintainable code, especially in larger scripts. For those increasingly rare times when higher-level scripting languages aren't an option, one can look up the necessary syntax.