> it's pretty damn sad that something as limited and now - ancient as bash represents some kind of optimum of productivity for many real-world "everyday programming" tasks

I absolutely agree with him on that bit, in it's day the ability to pipe the output of one command to another and the composability that gives you was incredible.

bash is undeniably useful (I use it every day) but I've been transitioning to python/envoy/docopt for a lot of things because despite more than a decades usage with bash I immediately have to hit google as soon as I want to do anything more complex than an if statement, it is just a horrible language (imo).

I like python for this as small single purpose programs are replaced by small (in terms of usage interface not nescessarily complexity) modules but the overall coherence feels better.

There is so much inertia around the tools and approaches I'm not sure how we'll ever move past this stage (Microsofts PowerShell had some promise as an approach for a while).