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I just assume at this point that a new python script from a coworker won’t run without an hour of tinkering and yelling obscenities at my screen. Or resorting to running in docker, which seems asinine. Python’s everywhere and does everything though, so I don’t have a good alternative. Shell scripts definitely aren’t it, but they generally hold up better when sharing in my experience.

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Shell scripts can't declare dependencies though, in the same way a pip package can. A shell script using this tool requires one to manually apt install it first, or run in a common docker image - asinine. If you don't, your script will fail halfway through during runtime (actually, likely it will not fail, just produce corrupted output, since shell by default ignores errors), a python IDE or mypy will tell you about missing packages during analysis before you try to build and run it.

Besides that, looking at json only, it's part of the standard library so is more likely to already exist on any given machine rather than this.

That depends on how well your bash script is constructed. If you carefully handle the falling case such as missing commands, non-root permissions, etc. It can be easy to use and kind of portable. Of course python scripts have better error trace so if the script doesnt work others can debug with relatively easily.

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