Both Perl and Python are way more complicated than shell programming, and in all my decades of doing so on the command line, I’ve yet to find a problem which a full blown shell + AWK couldn’t solve. And that combination is still simpler to program in than Python or Perl. Had you grown up on a real UNIX, you’d have never written what you wrote.
Perl is far more than anything you can ever do in Bash, even the basic things. Then there is also the famous Tom Christiansen Essay on C-shell: https://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/misc/csh.html
Perl's file and string manipulation capabilities has no match.
If you use awk you have to think in the line paradigm. Perl gives you not just that but a lot more. Perl regexes are by far the strongest of their kinds programming language out there(first class entities).
In fact the whole reason why Larry Wall invented Perl is at some point in time you max out what you can do with things like awk and sed.
I spent 3.5 years debugging and maintaining Perl code. For a living. I have formal education in programming applications in Perl.
And I stand by what I wrote about shell + AWK, especially AWK, any day of the week.
By the by, I can do unlimited number of things in a shell program, things no other programming language can do, because I can call any other program from it. Apart from assembler, shell is the second most powerful tool because of that characteristic.
Sure you can curl a data end point and then parse the resulting JSON/XML using regexes, cut, tr in bash+awk+sed, but your code will break even on a slight change of output rendered.
These sort of things are just the beginning. People will be surprised how hard it is to parse something like a csv.
You start to begin discovering limits when you start doing things like error handling. Writing slightly complicated regexes, or if you need a little complicated code written relying on if/for more often.
More everyday use cases that come to my mind are use of things like Data::Dumper, qw, open/while<>/close paradigm code, arrays, hashmaps, grepping over large lists, unicode, heredocs, handling binary data etc.
Nothing to take away from Bash. But its really to glue together a small bunch of unix commands in progression. If you are doing anything more than a 100 line program, you are better off with Perl.
“but your code will break even on a slight change of output rendered.”
I see you still don’t get it. I wouldn’t as an experienced shell programmer construct a JSON/XML parser; I use libxslt for XML and I compiled jq for parsing JSON. It’s the UNIX way.
Indeed, for that XML::Simple would be an operational nightmare to deploy and maintain (being fused into Perl’s tree), and your code would be unreadable and unmaintainable by anyone else, for such is the nature of Perl.
And then there is the UNIX way, with both jq and libxslt being reusable for other data without having to write a dedicated program. sed by the way is unnecessary if one has mastered AWK.
There are too many things you have not even begun to consider yet. You could start with taking those developer-convenience glasses off, and putting the system engineer glasses on.
