Right, but Python gives you the illusion of safety. And the person I was replying to was trying to dismiss this interesting Ansible alternative because it was written in a language he doesn’t like.
Python with type annotations can actually be pretty safe. There are also typechecked Python variants being developed. At any rate, I’d say the defect rate in Bash is incredibly higher than it is in Python, and 90% of that is due to unquoted string expansion. Try putting spaces in your paths and you’ll quickly see how 75% of the Unix stack breaks.
Somehow that is not a real problem in practice. Maybe whitespace is not needed in paths that much. If a need to store a random byte string in a file name appears once in a year, one can encode it into hexadecimal or base64 with % replacing /.
That's sort of like saying, lack of pointer safety is not a real problem in practice. Yes, you can work around it, but when it's a problem for production systems dealing with sensitive or untrusted data it's a huge problem.
