Page Comparison

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• a lot of weird (but powerful) syntax ( )
• a meager set of built-in data types
• functions and scripts can only return one small integer value
  • the proxy for this is capturing output, but this can be tricky
• no support for object oriented programming

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The combination of piping, a large set of built-in utilities, and the ease of creating and troubleshooting long "command line one-liners" provides tremendous productivity potential over, for example, having to write a Python program to achieve equivalent results.

This Piping a Histogram discussion Cut, sort, uniq and piping a histogram discussion in the Intermediate Unix course provides a good example.

For scripting

Because bash is an execution environment, it is uniquely well suited for executing a series of processing steps, often calling other programs or utilities, and integrating the results. Such scripts are sometimes termed pipeline scripts and can automate processes that consist of many sub tasks – for example, next-gen sequencing alignment pipeline scripts that go from raw reads (FASTQ files) to alignment reports (sorted, index BAM files), gathering statistics along the way.

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These days, complex pipelines may be difficult to write in any single programming language; thus workflow managers are becoming increasingly popular. These tools allow the integrated orchestration of many different workflow components, potentially written in many different languages, managing their dependencies via rules (think make, on steroids), and can also be effectively deployed in cloud environments such as AWS and Google Cloud. Both Nextflow and Snakemake, two of the most popular workflow managers, support rule bodies written in bash as well as other languages.

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From a the 2020 Stack Overflow programming languages poll (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020)