I work with a couple people who insistently write shell scripts in Python. I know it's anecdotal, but to me, it's like the metaphor 'When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' The scripts use functions liberally, but the code isn't DRY nor self-documented. Written in shell, it would take a fifth of the LOC because there's no need to use subprocess or Popen and parse the output. They're not the best developers, but I certainly trust their Python code than I would trust their shell code. And, there's plenty of work to go around, so it's better than nothing.