As a self-taught coder, I've experienced many times how highly skilled software engineers groan and sweat when they encounter shell scripts. I don't understand why, but it seems like people with a CS background are never really taught shell scripts and have come to irrationally fear them. It's sort of taboo.

This results in weird behavior, such as writing a groovy (Java?) script for Jenkins to execute bazel in order to build a go binary that runs the very same commands in an exec.Command() construct. Or people who download and import pandas to grab the third field in a csv file.

During the course of learning, I've naturally written code in bash that should have been written in another language. I replaced if statements with case because they turned out to be more performant. It's a great learning experience and why I got into python and go.

IMO we should use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that tool is a combination of unix utilities that you can put in a shell script for easier maintenance. It's just procedural execution of (usually very efficient) binaries, akin to a jenkins script or gitlab pipeline. Just mind the exceptions and use exit codes.