You're missing a step. You originally wrote "I don’t see why the shell must be both nice to program in and a concise textual interface."

I attempted to demonstrate how evolving a CLI session into a script is very beneficial. That bash is not great for that purpose is exactly the point of the article. A better shell language would mean not throwing away your organic, working code for a rewrite.

Unless you're trying to say that you rarely use the command line to explore a system and operate mostly through scripts. I think I would burn a lot of time in writing boiler plate when "curl | grep" would do the job for human consumption in less than 50 keystrokes.

I see what you mean now. I still draw the line differently - I don’t think I’ve ever interactively worked through conditional logic, control loops, or user prompts, so I’d happily make simple bash scripts from basic commands, but I wouldn’t choose to write more complex programs that way.