Any third parties reading this should take anything tptacek says with a grain of salt -- he's a well-known security contractor and his business model specifically consists of convincing his clients that they can't protect themselves by offering bug bounties.
> there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work.
Utter hogwash. There are countless artists who struggled with schizophrenia and bipolar and produced beautiful, amazing work -- Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, and Daniel Johnston spring to mind.
I should have clarified. I'm not talking about micro-optimizations. Bash doesn't scale operationally. You might be a bash wizard who never fucks up, but you're never going to be able to keep non-wizards from having to use your awful bash codebase.
Bash is not at all meant for "system administration task automation", the very idea is ludicrous. It has to be the most singularly ill-purposed invention ever to be applied towards task automation.
You need to fix your mentality. HCL not being a complete language is a feature. Bash is a liability. If you honestly think you can build more reliable modern systems in bash, you deserve to be laughed right back into the 70s where you belong.
More like "better the devil you know" (if you can even say that much).
Bash doesn't scale. Every shop larger than 1 has been burned by bash gotchas. Use a real scripting language and shell out to the commands and builtins when necessary.
At my shop bash is strictly disallowed in production environments and we're all better off for it.