That scripting in Python is pretty bad. It makes thing harder and at the same time you still have to think a lot about what can go wrong, because there's no enforced error handling.
> "Scripting" in a compiled language is not practical.
The premise is that scripts grow, and you should switch to Python. Which might be okay for Google, but seems to be only a very small step up from Bash, if any at all. (I've outlined the reasons, why I think it's not worth it.)
I do a lot of scripting, in Bash, and when that stars to grow on me, it's time to think about the problem for real. And usually a blind rewrite in Python is not the way to go.
> For some tasks that's perfectly sensible.
Those are the one-off scripts, no? Anything that should run with some regularity, anything that should be reproducible, that handles valuable data, is not something that should be cobbled together in bash/python and thrown into /etc/cron.d . Or apparently that's how Google rolls.
Yeah, well, maybe not everyone is an SRE, so the use case here seems to be build scripts and other not-so-critical scripts, that still have to be maintained, where knowledge of Bash/POSIX-sh is not really assumed, it should just work for anyone who checks out the repo.