I used to have that attitude, and Python is still my main language. But I do more and more stuff in shell now. Every project I write has a whole bunch of shell snippets now, which saves a ton of code and lowers the barrier to automation considerably.

If you're trying to write shell scripts in Python, they're going to be 3-5x longer. Bash is a higher level language than Python. Every tool has its place, and bash and Python are complementary.

Also I realize there is some useless ceremony in Python standard practice. Do you want to know what my Python test runner looks like now?

$ find . -name \*_test.py | sh -x -e

That's it... no BS. I don't know what people are using in the Python world these days but some of it has drifted toward "framework land".

Also, it's not very hard to make this parallel, whereas it is somewhat annoying in Python. And you don't have to worry about global variables polluting each other -- tests stay independent.

I test a big part of my C/C++ code with shell scripts as well.

So basically I find it very helpful to think of yourself as writing shell utilities in Python. Python's not your world. It's part of your world.