My first software internship in college, I was at a Microsoft shop. I ended up astonishing the people I worked with (who were all programmers) by automating sol

My first software internship in college, I was at a Microsoft shop. I ended up astonishing the people I worked with (who were all programmers) by automating solutions to some annoyances I ran into, some menial tasks I was assigned to do, etc. I did it all with Cygwin or MSYS, although I don't remember whether the scripts were Bash or Fish. All of my co-workers could have written their own code to automate such tasks. They even had access to PowerShell, which was by then part of Windows. But they didn't, because they didn't have a shell worth "living in" (PowerShell is much too slow-- and to a lesser extent, too verbose-- for daily interactive use), and writing code to automate the same tasks in a "real programming language" seemed laborious and boring enough that it always made sense to put it off and live with the mess. Solid bash experience would benefit lots of Windows developers.