What I was trying to say is that bash scripts are superficially simple but their behavior is hard to reason about.
I chose Rust for my example because its addition operation is tightly specified and thus the behavior is very easy to reason about. (I probably should have chosen a language other than Python for the counter example.)
As soon as shell scripts get mildly complex, like others in this thread I prefer to port them to Python.
Since I'm a FOSS programmer, I've often dealt with the misery of non-portable shell scripts. Userland incompatibilities across operating systems mean that the same bash program behaves differently because the userland programs bash calls behave differently.
In contrast, reasoning about the portability of a Python script is much easier than predicting which tangle of flags in a shell script will do the right thing.
> What I was trying to say is that bash scripts are superficially simple but their behavior is hard to reason about.
But the counterpoint is that this is dependent on situation, and if the behavior you're trying to "reason" about is better captured by the operation of tools like "find", "objcopy", "openssl", "nc", "rsync", etc... than it is by a Python library-based attempt at the same stuff, then putting that behavior into a shell script is a net win regardless of "complexity".
I chose Rust for my example because its addition operation is tightly specified and thus the behavior is very easy to reason about. (I probably should have chosen a language other than Python for the counter example.)
As soon as shell scripts get mildly complex, like others in this thread I prefer to port them to Python.
Since I'm a FOSS programmer, I've often dealt with the misery of non-portable shell scripts. Userland incompatibilities across operating systems mean that the same bash program behaves differently because the userland programs bash calls behave differently.
In contrast, reasoning about the portability of a Python script is much easier than predicting which tangle of flags in a shell script will do the right thing.