More like "better the devil you know" (if you can even say that much).
Bash doesn't scale. Every shop larger than 1 has been burned by bash gotchas. Use a real scripting language and shell out to the commands and builtins when necessary.
At my shop bash is strictly disallowed in production environments and we're all better off for it.
I wouldn't expect bash to scale anyway. That's not what it's meant for. It's meant for system administration task automation.
On a more serious note ...
In many occasions, the performance you get depends on how you tackle the problem you have, though. Even using bash and the tools from the unix toolbox, sometimes you can gain significant improvements on how you manage your data.
Anecdotal: I cannot remember the details, but I remember that rearranging the order of sorting and searching and removing duplicates (sort, sort -u, grep, uniq mainly) I saw a significant speedup.
Anecdotal (2): I cut the execution time of a night-running job from hours to minutes (tens of minutes, to be honest - but still less than an hour) just by slicing the size of a problem into smaller parts and by handling each slice in parallel (the machine had 48 cpus, but the problem was being solved "sequentially" on one cpu alone). I wrote some 30-50 lines of python, just to implement parallelism control: the rest of the problem was still handled with bash script. Partial results were reassembled at the end. Bash has coprocesses, so I might have handled that in bash as well, but python was more handy at the time (meh, i just wanted to optimize that problem).
What I am trying to say is that sometimes the "scaling" you get is justified by the size of the problem, sometimes it's not.
It's worth noting that bash is really a glue language to call other programs. If you mainly use the tools from the unix toolbox (i'm thinking of grep, for example) you really get the "scaling" (the performance) of native executable code.
Again, it really depends on how you handle your data.
Having a number of filters chained via pipes is really efficient, for example, when compared with looping over an array and executing some python/perl/ruby one-liners every time.
I should have clarified. I'm not talking about micro-optimizations. Bash doesn't scale operationally. You might be a bash wizard who never fucks up, but you're never going to be able to keep non-wizards from having to use your awful bash codebase.
Bash is not at all meant for "system administration task automation", the very idea is ludicrous. It has to be the most singularly ill-purposed invention ever to be applied towards task automation.
More like "better the devil you know" (if you can even say that much).
Bash doesn't scale. Every shop larger than 1 has been burned by bash gotchas. Use a real scripting language and shell out to the commands and builtins when necessary.
At my shop bash is strictly disallowed in production environments and we're all better off for it.