> Surely it can't be harder to learn the fundamentals of shell scripting than to learn whatever flavor-of-the-month alternative is? I've been using GNU/Linux fo

> Surely it can't be harder to learn the fundamentals of shell scripting than to learn whatever flavor-of-the-month alternative is? I've been using GNU/Linux for ~10 years, and Bash never clicked for me. Meanwhile, picking up other (not all) programming languages in the meantime occurred naturally, without much effort. At the same time, some of my friends picked up unix shell scripting just fine, even if typical programming is harder for them. I suspect some people have trouble with the syntax used by Bash, and languages like Perl. But I can't pinpoint what causes it.