This is ridiculous. Python won scripting because it offers a sane way to do sequential, shell-ish things, without having to wade through "man bash" or searching stack overflow for the umpteenth time about the syntax to do something that should be trivial but is anything but.
Saying that younger devs only know python is like a FORTRAN engineer in the 90s saying young devs only know java. No one needs to apologize for growing up learning better mature readable shit.
The number of gotchas and tricky nonsense in bash could (and probably does) fill books (array indexing, string comparison, quoting, toggling 'set -e', many more). I don't doubt that there are clever grey beards that are wizards that know the arcana. That doesn't mean arcane should be what you build an engineering culture around.
> This is ridiculous. Python won scripting because it offers a sane way to do sequential, shell-ish things, without having to wade through "man bash" or searching stack overflow for the umpteenth time about the syntax to do something that should be trivial but is anything but.
You've inadvertently supported exactly my point.
You just advocate for the lazy way out. You know Python, so that's what you use and nothing more. God forbid you check out a reference. I mean, your lazyness leads you to believe that having docs.python.com on speed dial for a dozen different major or backwards incompatible releases is ok, but oh God forbid you check up a single man page of a tool that exists since the beginning of time.
Ridiculous, and all of this just because you believe you know Python, and that's all you have to offer.
Shell scripts are standard, omnipresent, reliable, and readily available infrastructure. There's no way around it. There's no excuse, let alone laziness and refusal to learn, which in this field is outright incompetence. The only reason someone refuses to use shell scripts for this sort of job is dereliction of duty and outright incompetence, and that is not winning in anyone's books.
So you say we should choose the hard way, because the easy way is lazy?
Also, your point can be turned around - you could use python which produces readable and maintanable code, but instead you choose the easy, lazy way of using bash, which you already know really well.
Saying that younger devs only know python is like a FORTRAN engineer in the 90s saying young devs only know java. No one needs to apologize for growing up learning better mature readable shit.
The number of gotchas and tricky nonsense in bash could (and probably does) fill books (array indexing, string comparison, quoting, toggling 'set -e', many more). I don't doubt that there are clever grey beards that are wizards that know the arcana. That doesn't mean arcane should be what you build an engineering culture around.