If you don't care for portability and you need "advanced" language features like arrays and other bash-isms why do you hurt yourself by using such a terrible programing language?
In my experience shell scripts are fine for starting (and restarting) various programs and daemons or as thin wrappers around other apps. Beyond that I don't see the point. There's nothing other languages won't do better.
I've seen many "small bash scripts" grow up to thousands of lines, adding features one by one. And then you have to maintain that mess that catches fire every time an unexpected condition occurs because error handling in shell scripts is a joke.
In my experience shell scripts are fine for starting (and restarting) various programs and daemons or as thin wrappers around other apps. Beyond that I don't see the point. There's nothing other languages won't do better.
I've seen many "small bash scripts" grow up to thousands of lines, adding features one by one. And then you have to maintain that mess that catches fire every time an unexpected condition occurs because error handling in shell scripts is a joke.