Still can, if you want it to. I'll admit my perl chops have rusted clean away.
But it used to be something you could rely on having, and never had the dependency hell problem that's plagued python, for whatever reason.
Also never went through the 2-to-3 transition tsuris, instead opting to make its sequel the Duke Nukem Forever of programming languages.
I haven’t found Bash to be much better in practice. You can’t really do much with Bash alone, it’s only as useful as the tools you use it with, the ones you install with your OS package manager. And Bash versions themselves can vary dramatically. Try writing non-trivial Bash scripts that are portable between macOS and Linux...it’s a nightmare.
(Yes I know there are libs for python that can do this, but in general Go is just simpler: it has everything I need for writing utilities out of the box, including way simpler package management, and I can come back 2 years later to some code I wrote and jump back into it with no effort.)
This is like half the point for me. It's that I have lots of cli tools I like to use, and many of them are very unix-philosophy like. I want to cobble them together to accomplish a task, and since they already work with shell and pipes etc, it's trivial.
Now in an alternative, I have to go find some library that does the equivalent, or write my own version of the functions, etc, and lots of times those libraries have the thier own sets of pitfalls. I like bash because it encourages sticking the unix philsophy of do one thing and do it well (because you are just using it as a glue, not as a material itself). (also sometimes I just want something thats easy to read and understand)
For all those who bash bash as so horrible, unstable, non-prod.... bash scripts aren't perfect, and nobody who uses bash would say so, but bash runs on millions of prod systems across the world and things are fine... so maybe whats needed is a bit less holier-than-thou attitude from those people and bit more "you do you".
I'm not bashing Bash, I use Bash all the time and it's enormously useful. But it has limitations and tradeoffs that make me reach for other things more often.
Can you read the Go source code from a Go binary? Is the algorithm transparent to the user?
How do you jump back to work on a binary? You have to keep the source code somewhere else (probably in a repo somewhere); now you have an application instead of a script.
You should be doing that for scripts as well! Far too often I've seen problems arise when a team depends on a process but its just a shell script run by cron from the home directory of the guy who's on vacation.
You could also do `go run main.go` if you want to be close to the source. The Gitlab Runner repo has a "script" run like that[1].
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/master/Ma...