That's all fair.

I don't think we should abolish sh or anything; it's one of the only truly ubiquitous tools. And folks should know it, the same way they should know nano or ed or whatnot in case they ever get on a system without vim. I just wish it weren't the first resort for so many tasks, you know?

Nitty:

> I've encountered work systems where backups were performed work, based on a bash script and everything else on the system was bricked

I've had better luck with Python in those cases. Even when the shell works, some of the programs my shell scripts call out to are often damaged by whatever broke the system. Python's capabilities are more or less present in memory after "import" and rely on fewer external programs in most cases.

We're similarly aged; I think you might be lucky to have had a lot of fun with tools like Perl early in your career. I got dumped into something of a shell/C/Perl salt mine and had to develop deep expertise in things that I saw more mis-use of than benefit from, so when I discovered alternatives they felt a lot more compelling. Different strokes for different folks I guess. At least we can be thankful that Perl and Python got popular for automation before JavaScript did.

Thanks for the thoughtful replies.