Confession: The horrors of bash set back my programming hobby until high school. Even then, I didn't actually like interacting with my computer programmatically until I found a comfortable set of tools sometime in college. I'm lucky that my day job lets me use the tools I like and avoid systems like the bash shell.
Interestingly my experience has been opposite. My first programming adventure was automating some file validation using bash. I agree though that the silly and inconsistent syntax made me really appreciate python when I started learning it.
