Something I've not seen done, but to me seems like it would be much more useful than a shell script (or maybe would have, in these tools' heyday), would have been to use a tool like Chef or Ansible to manage dev dependencies on developer laptops.

The trouble with shell scripts is that they generally require you to manage the state of the machine - whether or not something is installed, before I go install and configure it. Or, if it's already configured, what configs to leave in place, and what configs to reset.

With Chef, for instance, everything's declarative. I don't say "install this package"; rather, I say "this package should be installed". Nobody ever runs the setup script just once, since the dev environment is constantly changing, and all of those edge cases (maybe I last ran it on rev 3, or rev 7 - how do I get to rev 12?) become hard to manage.