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> Like I understand some people can legitimately program in bash [0]. But I just can’t bring myself to practice. Why would anyone inflict this language on themselves?

Bash has a lot of pitfalls, but once you learn how to deal with them, it can also be quite superb for some tasks. Piping the output of a complex set of loops into GNU parallel and watching your computer process stuff at blazing speed is a very nice experience. Doing the same in python would be many time more verbose.

> I use zsh daily but type `xonsh` any time I do something in the shell that would normally require a google.

Personally, I stopped using `jq` in favor of python oneliners, they a bit more verbose but also cross-compatible, works out of the box (not everyone has jq, but most of people have python (pre)installed on their machines) and it is easy to implement a oneliner, i.e.:

   curl -X GET "https://httpbin.org/json" -H "Accept: application/json" | python -c 'import sys, json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)["slideshow"]["author"])'

Do xonsh helps you write a tar command without googling [0] or browsing a man?

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1168/

Bash combined with utilities is like a swiss knife of scripting, you won't be doing any major woodwork with it but it sure is a heck of a useful tool.