Bash-like scripting in shells is prevalent in operating systems but I don’t understand why, when it doesn’t have the syntax to make programming easy like other languages. What features does bash have that make it so suitable for shells? Why even new operating systems like Redox OS choose a very similar syntax over a completely different programming language?
50k lines is, IMHO, way too large for a bash script. I’d switch to python long before before that. Bash is primarily an *interactive shell. Bash has a lot of nice scripting capabilities (that few are aware of, let alone use) but its primary use is not as a programing language. As far as standard libraries go: sed, awk, grep, curl, netcat, etc… provide plenty of advanced capabilities. That’s the Unix philosophy, lots of small utilities that each do one thing well and that work with streams of bytes as i/o. Tie them together with a powerful shell, and an ordinary user can do quite a lot without “programming”. Is the Unix philosophy perfect? No. Has it proved to be the most flexible and successful compute environment developed for over 50 years? Yes.