> And what would you recommend for a system automation script 20 years ago, when I was 13 and discovered Linux for the first time?

Like I said:

> Maybe it had to be that way because we didn’t know any better … But that doesn’t make it good.

I’ve gotten kind of pointlessly good at bash tricks—the weird advanced shit that Wooledge warns about. Same for Perl5: 6 years on a multimillion line healthcare monolith wishing for a real object system, a single scoping model instead of three, and people to stop implementing rickety DSLs because the language was just flexible enough to let them but not flexible enough to make the tooling or DX any good.

All of which is to say: I get it. Those languages were some of the first I learned, and hold a charming sort of nostalgia for me as well. They are still objectively bad. We have vastly better tools now in those niches.