I wrote another comment here about a strategy for writing portable Bash scripts without compromising on features and freely using arbitrary external commands. I wanted to give an example from the article of how I'd likely write one of his examples of a "somewhat unreadable shell script" in this style.

His ugly sh example:

  morning_greetings=('hi' 'hello' 'good morning')
  energetic_morning_greetings=()

  for s in "${morning_greetings[@]}"; do
    energetic_morning_greetings+=( "${s^^}!" )
  done

  morning_greetings = ['hi', 'hello', 'good morning']
  energetic_morning_greetings = \
     [s.upper() + '!' for s in morning_greetings]

  morning_greetings=(hi hello 'good morning')
  printf '%s!\n' "${morning_greetings[@]}" \
    | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' \
    | readarray -t energetic_morning_greetings

The piece this example is too simple to show (since it's focused only on data operations and not interacting with the filesystem or running external programs) is how much shorter the Bash usually ends up being than the Python equivalent.