I'm a computer scientist/software engineer that has used primarily Unix or Linux systems since the 80's. I write shell scripts occasionally, but I just find them error prone enough that I'd rather use python than sh for complex scripts. Python has some packages that make working with files, directories, and processes tolerable and at least I can understand the string quoting rules in python.

Generally my order of preference for shell scripting tasks is: python > bash > pearl > tcl > sh > anything > AppleTalk.