"Shell scripts are great at tricking you into believing you've got something 100% working" Exactly. Shell scripting is basically a non-hygenic macro language,

"Shell scripts are great at tricking you into believing you've got something 100% working" Exactly. Shell scripting is basically a non-hygenic macro language, with very complex semantics around its primary data type, the string. It also lacks pretty much all of the affordances we use to write reliable programs. I have no doubt someone has written a typechecker or unit test framework for bash, but I've never seen one used. I'll take the ugly code with the straightforward semantics, thanks.