Bash can be _extremely_ cryptic as well, we just learned it over time. Look at awk :)

Why use bash when you can use Python with os and sys modules?

I prefer Python when appropriate, but if you're going to "shell out" a lot and pipe a bunch of commands together it starts getting too verbose and loses it's elegance. I agree with other posters that bash is not intuitive, but if you've worked with it for a long time, there's nothing like being able to cat | grep | sed in a one-liner, rather than creating a bunch of Process objects, etc.

If you're doing cat, grep, sed I'd say that bash is very intuitive and I use it for that purpose all the time. If you're writing bash scripts, with if structures and loops and everything, then just python.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I still prefer to stay in bash even when I need loops and conditionals. If I'm already writing in Python, then sure, Python it is. Or ruby, or js, or whatever I'm in. But when I'm in bash and I can do it easily enough in bash, why complicate?

Python is great for writing scripts, but not so great for doing interactive maintenance.

then perl, then python, then bash.

Then back at awk.

Heh, I didn't want to mention it. awk strive from word of mouth.