Why Python is Better than Bash

Can you tell me why Python is better than Bash?

Are you asking me to bash the Bash programming language?

Not necessarily bashing it. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each one?

You can use bash, AKA shell scripting, for a lot of things. Yet almost anything you can do in bash you can do in Python.

Why would anyone do anything in Bash?

Bash scripts will be shorter than the short Python program. But the Bash script will be much longer than a longer Python program.

I’d expect a programming language to be better at creating programs.

Bash lets you create pipelines from existing programs in the shell to other programs, something Python doesn’t do neatly.

It sounds like Bash is better than Python.

Shells like Bash are hard to use to run scripts. It takes a lot of effort to join multiple processes, wasting your time and the computer’s memory.

Bash is faster, then.

Scripts can execute quickly, whereas the Python interpreter slows down the execution of Python code. However, when the script gets over a thousand lines, Python programs are faster.

Which language is more available?

The Bash shell is not on all Linux instantiations. Python is part of a majority of Linux distributions now.

The world does not run on Linux, no matter what all those sys admins would like to think.

Python scripts are more maintainable.

Because you are creating code modules.

Bash lacks pointers, linked lists or other data structures. Bash can’t tell when one data record ends and another begins, so you can’t use it for database queries.

So that’s why Python gets used for web interfaces.

Bash won’t let you save someone’s shopping order or query a database record via a web interface. Then there’s the fact Python is far better than Bash when it comes to filename handling.

Hey, you had me at web interface.