Known system dependency that's (almost) always on the system you're on.
I remember somebody once telling me that they had learned vi because "it was always installed". Well, no, technically, the only editor you can be sure is there is ed. So, you know, learn that. I was surprised that they actually did.
Bash is syntactically not perfect, I agree. However it's a well known, mature, stable environment. LLMs can write it well if you need them to. If it was perfect, we'd never have had Perl, and as a result we'd never have had Ruby, Python and other scripting languages.
But I like it's a tool that doesn't require me to go reach for a package manager and some build tools I don't always have on every system.
I’ve been down this path (it was a script for scraping and extracting text). You write your text utility in bash. It works. Then you need a regex so you use sed.
Then you wonder why it doesn’t work in your other environment. Then you find that GNU vs BSD sed have different syntax.
Better to start with Python once you’re doing more than coordinating well known other tools.
> technically... you can be sure there's ed
Unfortunately, ed has been omitted from the default installation of recent debians, at least. I had to install it manually.
WTF?! RIP Debian.
If I wanted an OS without a text editor, I'd use emacs.
Who's updating their blog from a random machine without Python on it, though?
It's not python that's the dependency that needs managing. It's pip and the keystone cops it brings along.
I'd presume it's quite common with NixOS. At least I don't have python linked to my environment. It might be different would I use the REPL, but I do not, so for me python is a program (or script) dependency, not something I need to carry around. It's actually quite common for many setup scripts to fail when python is not installed, but not all of them list python as a dependency either.
To be fair, qualifying bash as on (almost) every system and then poo-pooing vi as being also on (almost) every system seems odd. Had you said sh instead of bash the analogy would have worked better.