> "And lastly, because we're fed up with having to install half-an-universe's worth of Ruby, Python and Perl to bootstrap our servers or run CI jobs"
If this takes off, some will use it some won't, and we'll be stuck installing a "half-an-universe's worth of Ruby, Python, Perl, and Shellfire scripts to bootstrap our servers or run CI jobs"
The proof in the pudding will be trying to make libertine linux use it - a not even started project of mine to build a minimal, net-bootable linux with an immutable file system (upgrade == reboot a new image).
We've long been at the point where you can expect Perl and Python to be installed (Perl is required by the Debian's base tools, and Python by Redhat's).
You may not have the libraries you need at the version you need, and it's a shame that neither system has a convenient way to address that (Python virtualenv remains a hacky solution IMHO).
I was initially enthused by Shellfire's offering but, come to think of it, all it's doing is bringing SH scripting to some level with Perl or Python... but, as you point out, we have those already.
Of course, since they have many geniuses working on their codebase, I assume the problem must actually be pretty fundamental and tricky.... right?
If the job requires one page of code or less, use shell. If it requires more than one page of code, use Python or whatever. Simple as that.
I still hate Perl anyway - source code obfuscation by design is a terrible thing to do to your brain.
Python has a upgrade problem. We're still running a bunch of CentOS 5.5 machines which depend on Python 2.4. In my org, we still have scripts littered around that expect a later version of python, but are executed from just "#!/usr/bin/python" instead of "python2.7". which fails on those old CentOS machines, on which you can't just set a newer version of Python as default because that'll break many system utilities.
Also, Perl's syntactic sugar for regular expressions turns out to be very useful (and I say this after years of grumbling against it).
The problem with this simple guideline is that tools grow, so what was well less than a page becomes much more—and each small increment is too small to justify a complete re-write, so eventually you wind up with a huge shell-script monster.