title: Shell script replacement?
body: <p>I'm starting to get sick of shell scripts to perform automations and glue codes between stuff. I love using it for quick and dirty data processing, but even for simple 3 line code that spawns a process and remembers its process id, it's taking me very long time to program it correctly.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>For every commands, if I don't explicitly check for return codes, the script might terminate with exit code 0 even when I don't want to. so each shell command gets followed by if statement to see whether the program terminated correctly or not..</li>
  <li>Passing variables, and writing robust command line argument parser is hard (something like <code>optparse</code> in Python).</li>
  <li>It's very hard to debug.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I use python for most of my work, and yet, it feels bit verbose when I'm trying to use it for shell-scripting purposes, if I start to use the <code>subprocess</code> module.</p>
  
  <p>I was thinking whether there's a good middle ground between this. Like, either writing robust shell script without being so verbose, or writing less verbose automation scripts in higher level language such as Python.</p>