I find that shell scripting has a sharp cliff. I agree with the sentiment that most things are over engineered. However it’s really easy to go from a simple shell script running a few commands to something significantly more complex just to do something seemingly simple, like parse a semantic version, make an api call and check the status code etc, etc.

The other problem with shell scripting on things like GHA is that it’s really easy to introduce security vulnerabilities by e.g forgetting to quote your variables and letting an uncontrolled input through.

There’s no middle ground between bash and python and a lot of functionality lives in that space.

> However it’s really easy to go from a simple shell script running a few commands to something significantly more complex just to do something seemingly simple, like parse a semantic version, make an api call and check the status code etc, etc.

Maybe I keep making the wrong assumption that everyone is using the same tools the same way and thats why my opinions seem very strong. But I wouldn't even think of trying to "parse a semantic version" in shell, I am treating the shell scripts and task runners as plumbing, I would be handing that of a dedicated tool to action.