> Is bash simply popular because it is always available and so there's nothing inherent that makes it popular? Exactly. > [...] And not often in a better way.

> Is bash simply popular because it is always available and so there's nothing inherent that makes it popular? Exactly. > [...] And not often in a better way. Compared to a fully-fledged programming language? I sure hope so. > What are the most interesting, alternatives for simple scripts. For simple scripts, there's no better alternative. ZSH has some features that you wouldn't find in bash at the time. The safest approach is to use bash or shell (/bin/sh). For programming languages golang binaries are portable, that's the big advantage over python, ruby, perl, etc. When you need to perform advanced error checking, etc. makes sense to use a programming language. For simple operations bash is great, assuming one understands how process ripping works, signal propagation etc. works.