It looks surprisingly good, but I fear you are singing into the wind.

If I am going to write a new scripting component (not an application, a server or the like), it's going to be in one of two languages these days, Python or Bash.

And don't get me wrong, Bash is "great" and powerful but it's also a terrible kludge and suffers from several evil traps, all well-known but still traps. All else being equal, it seems as if PowerShell might have been a better choice.

But you see, my interest now is writing code that is clear and complete and can be maintained by anyone, so I can go on to other things. Everyone's life will be better if I avoid as much fuss as I can.

For short scripting components that call a lot of other executables, Bash is the most fuss-free choice. If I write a neat and careful Bash program using best practices (`set euxo -pipefail` or some subset, parameter checking, and keeping lines short and therefore clearer by liberal usage of the backslash at end-of-line), it's very likely that the person coming after me will be able to keep it working.

(As an aside, it's my impression that the probability of errors in a line of code increases faster than linearly with the number of characters in it! In a shell script, many invocations of executables will have to be very long, but just line breaks and organization can reduce the error rate. In Python, that doesn't hack it, but I find extracting out intermediate variables, comprehensions or functions can go a long way to make sure that each line at least expresses a single clear idea.)

For any longer scripts, for anything with logic in it, Python is the most logical choice. It has a huge number of features out of the box, you can write unit tests, CLIs, GUIs, you name it, but most important, people understand Python very well, and they will be able to maintain my code without my help.

Perhaps it's unfortunate that Bash is more widely used than Powershell but here we are.

Thanks for a thought-provoking article, accept claps!