I got tired of PHP and Perl, so I tried bash
Shell scripting gets a lot of hate, but after spending time to grok the language (and copious use of shellcheck), I've grown quite fond of it. This also has the nice side effect of emphasizing use of old unix tools.<p>I think the "big realization" for me was shifting to think in pipelines instead of passing state around in variables. That completely removed the pain of no arrays in POSIX shell for me. Stdin/stdout are your friend.<p>Certainly, shell scripting isn't the answer for everything, but with shellcheck (and bats!), I feel like it's a really reasonable default for systemy things. Heck, the status bar I use in my window manager is essentially just a 700 line bash script, with asyncronous update and everything. It's even quite readable and orthogonally organized, if I might boast. Have been pleasantly surprised over the years every time I go back and read it.