The obvious solution would be to use something more sane, like PowerShell or nushell, but instead old experts will always defend the skills they have honed for years, while criticizing anything that's different.
As for widening the scope to other tools, I've written about that on here before, how I have lots of powershell experience, some nushell, etc. I haven't become a convert (definitely not on Linux, of course occasionally on Windows).
Happy to respond to any input or anything, but you should reply directly to people if you're going to criticize them -- very poor form to blanket criticize while also taking an uncharitable read.
People use Bash as the default shell for scripting, because people use Bash as the default shell for scripting. If you want to replace it, you should pick a winner and discourage the use of alternatives, especially when they are better than Bash. So don't say "use something more sane, like PowerShell or nushell". Say something like "use PowerShell, or Bash if you really have to for legacy purposes, but never use nushell for any reason" instead.
I really like the UNIX way of using text I/O, it has it flaws but it works for me. But that being said, I still hate bash and all its family. It has so many footguns it is an entire armory at this point, mostly related to spaces and escaping.
Something Perl-like could be a saner replacement. It is already a bit shell-like, it doesn't struggle with escaping the way bash does, and it has very powerful text processing abilities that go well with traditional UNIX tools.
It's not so much about defending arcane scripting skills, but that Bash functions as a lowest common denominator and is useful because of that. If you want something that works reliably over decades, then it's best not to go for an "improved" shell as it may not still be around.
I like to think of Bash script writing as the opposite of riding a bike - you have to relearn it almost every time you write a script.
My main shell isn't even bash, I go with zsh, but if I'm writing a script for general use I go with bash.
1. Things have developed over time. Bash and other shells weren't always this way. If you have ever touched different shells, awk, sed and so on and then touch perl you see how it is basically just the glue between the other tools put into one language.
2. The majority of scripts is written in sh or bash. So these shells won't go away anytime soon and any newcomer will be confronted with them. So it's best to know all the edge cases before you do stuff you don't want to do. And yes, you could always install another shell. But that brings another dependency and opens up another can of worms. In professional environments it's not really an option to have the next exotic language.
It's like having a tmux.conf on your local machine that configures tmux exactly the way you want it. Nice to have but the moment you touch any of the other billions of systems out there that run the default configuration, you might be lost because you never learned the default and only use your modified version.
Possibly more for DevOps than a dev.
I once had to scrape the output out of something hacked together by a grad student 10 years before me, scrape yet another hacked together application, do some fancy numerics, and then plonk it into a database. I did it without tears!
I prefer Almquist (ash), eg., NetBSD sh, Debian sh with tab completion, busybox ash, etc.
Powershell must be slow and/or bloated like Bash; someone wrote xargs in C++ for Windows:
Given that its manpage states that Bash is slow, perhaps it is not well-suited to be a scripting shell (cf. an interactive shell)
Ironically, the main friction point were not old-fashioned tools (which `from ssv` usually handled nicely) but the 'new generation' of core CLI tools like eza or fzf. They have really nice visualizations, but they do not output structured data as a middle step, so all the colours and lines only play havoc with nu's parsing.
Since I need to "ls" a lot more often than I need to do data manipulation, the tools won and I went back to zsh. Still keep nu around for the occasional config/data file wrangling though.
Option 1: Learn to bat and try to translate. Hmm. No. Just no Option 2: ?
Pwsh core had just come out. My immediate thought was that it would be great material for an anti-MS-ragging blog post, but then a line leapt out at me from one article I was glossing over: "... POSIX Terminal Shell Spec ...".
I still wanted that anti-MS-ragging blog material, so I decided to try and use Pwsh as a Rosetta stone until I got to a point I could convert to a real language.
But things just began to click for me. It was like going from Perl to Python - suddenly everything is an object and you can interact with everything* that way.
There's no need for grep or awk or sed in pwsh, because the output of a shell command is an object -- a string (or []byte). It has methods.
(netstat -an).replace("192.168.86.", "10.0.100.")
6 years later, pwsh is the default shell on my Mac, Ubuntu boxes, lab vms, ... everything but my docker containers unless I'm feeling feisty.
The only reasons people still use it are historical and laziness.
If it was invented today, professionals would cringe at it.
for f in *.txt; do
wc -l "$f"
done
Or this?
find . -name '*.sh' -exec wc -l {} +
Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don't have spaces:
find . -name '*.log' | xargs rm
Looks more like "system administration"