I don't think it's too unreasonable to assume that you'll be able to find bash anywhere you'd find a general purpose python installation and it has plenty of niceties.
But even the nicest shell doesn't solve the dependency problem like statically compiled programs. If I could take my currently running Python code and produce some artifact that would run with nothing other than the python binary I think we'd be in a much better place.
Ohh apparently all I've needed in my life is zipapps.
Agreed that Bash is (relatively) fine, although error prone. My comment was about POSIX shell, which has none of the features (arrays, [[ instead of [, etc.) that make programming tolerable in Bash.
One drawback is that if you want your Bash script to work on macOS, you need to restrict yourself to features that exist on version 3.2 (from 2006) because that's the latest version that will ever be included on macOS by default.
> If I could take my currently running Python code and produce some artifact that would run with nothing other than the python binary I think we'd be in a much better place.
But even the nicest shell doesn't solve the dependency problem like statically compiled programs. If I could take my currently running Python code and produce some artifact that would run with nothing other than the python binary I think we'd be in a much better place.
Ohh apparently all I've needed in my life is zipapps.