I feel like using Bash is a double-edged sword. Yes, it's available on every modern unix-like (notably absent from the base system in the *BSDs), but the language (being an sh descendant) is honestly horrible for anything more complex than 200-300 lines of plugging one command into another. Ticket isn't even pure Bash; it embeds several inline, 100+-line AWK scripts, and a giant jq query (an external tool!). All of which is horrible for syntax highlighting, mind you.
These days Python is almost as universally available, and I've seen few systems ship without Perl. Both provide excellent backward compatibility; I have many scripts that still run unchanged on Python 3.6 (2016).
Thanks! I agree completely. Dependency tracking is such a vital part of organizing work and it's hard to find good tooling for that. Beads started out as one and I wanted to maintain the simplicity it used to offer.
And I may just go make a README tweak re: unix philosophy... The MVP story floated up from the back of my mind when I went to go build this but you're totally right.
More relevantly: I've spent way too long rolling my own issue tracking systems (plural!) over the years, and it's good to see someone else share my intuition that dependencies and tagging are by far the most important part of solo-ish issue trackers. You'd be shocked how many massive tech companies publish issue trackers where dependencies are an afterthought (or worse: a paid upgrade).
My only tiny, soft suggestion would be mention "Unix Philosophy" rather than just the MVP link, tho it is indeed cute. As I alluded to above, the former has a dedicated cult behind it already ;)