> Since it allows you to break a big piece of procedural shell code with lots of control flow (if X is installed don't install again, etc) into small self contained functional pieces with clean input and output boundaries which can be run individually

At that point, I use a scripting -not shell- language (which is not as implicit)

I don't program in c anymore, so my major workflow is all in one language; I write my server in the same language that do s the compilation, which is in the same language that does utilities like creating network tunnels to my lab nodes