That's precisely the kind of dismissive comment I needed to read today. You don't seem to have read the link, in which the author makes good points for moving to Ruby, or think that somebody maintaining 20k of complex shell script should actually "learn shell scripting". I'm sure the author is well-informed about shell scripting. While it's certainly convenient in a pitch, it has little support for unit-testing, error handling or other things which are extremely useful to ensure a robust codebase.