Use the right tool for the job. The authors complaints seem to stem from not properly maintaining the supporting scripts in their project, which isn't at all a function of the language.
Bash makes everyone a muppet if you push it hard enough. (True of all tools, perhaps. But you don’t have to push very hard with bash.)
Unfortunately, the world's full of muppets, present company not excluded.
Most devs are not deeply steeped in Unix, and don't really know what they're doing with this as it's not their main job. They kinda clobber something together that "kinda works" – right up to the point it doesn't.
There is no shame in that; I do that with some stuff too – we all do – because there is no point learning something in-depth if you use it once a year. This is not a "zomg devs are stoopid" rant, it's just an observation of fact.
I've written tons of shell scripts and and I love how it enables you to do something useful very quickly in very little code. Last week I hacked together a "ncurses"-type terminal music player in less than 200 lines which actually works fairly well, which I thought wasn't too bad for an evening of work.
But in general I distrust other people's shell scripts, and I found that 9 times out of 10 that's warranted. I tend to push for zsh as it fixes the most egregious footguns and limitations, but there's still plenty of things to do wrong, and the syntax can be unfamiliar.
Fixed it for you. This is why they pay us the medium bucks.
Shell scripts are often the peak of "works on my machine".
But I worked with an extremely bash-skilled guy at IBM many years ago who went out of his way to write his scripts in the most arcane way possible. On purpose.
It was his form of job security, from rough memory when I asked wtf?. ;)
I wasn't project lead on that one, so we just had to put up with it... :(
That being said, if you and your team just don't have a lot of bash/unix experience, that is probably a good argument for writing your utility scripts in whatever you can actually write without a ton of bugs.
Would you complain about node bugs if your org wasn't standardizing the node version people used and some people were still on node 12??
It can go the other way as well. tcl was originally conceived as an embeddable scripting language that can drive GUI applications, and has been very successful in that use-case. It has a few flaws, but I would have preferred it to been embedded in the browser instead of making up Javascript back in the day.
Could you elaborate?
That and often making the scripts overly complex and a software project in themselves. Changes are that if you're building/deployment scripts are this complex that you are not leveraging modern tooling and platforms efficiently and re-invented the wheel in script form.
A recent example I encountered was an Ansible environment. While looking how other teams had set up their playbooks for something, I came across an extremely complex one. It basically pulled a bunch of java apps from artifactory and wrapped them in complex bash logic. All of this to do some conditional checks and send out a mail through a custom java mail client.
This amounted to over a hundred lines of code that I could replace with a handful of lines in Ansible.
yes, this. Engineers frequently try to converge everything into the one-true-way and go too far. (I blame this thinking for phones without buttons or touchscreen cars)
Makes no sense to write scripts in C++. I've worked on projects where people have tried to do this, and they end up being more fragile, cumbersome and not that useful.
I think python is ok for cross-platform.
a shell is good for command line/os logic.
seriously a shell script with 'set -e' at the top, and a lot of command invocations and not much else is pretty easy for a group to maintain.
Pretending it is not, OTOH, is.