#!bin/bash

It's a convention so the *nix shell knows what kind of interpreter to run.

For example, older flavors of ATT defaulted to "sh" (the Bourne shell), while older versions of BSD defaulted to "csh" (the C shell).

Even today (where most systems run "bash", the "Bourne Again Shell"), scripts can be in bash, python, perl, ruby, PHP, etc, etc. For example, you might see "!/bin/perl" or "/bin/perl5".

PS: The exclamation mark ("!") is affectionately called "bang". The shell comment symbol ("#") is sometimes called "hash".

PPS: Remember - under *nix, associating a suffix with a file type is merely a convention, not a "rule". An "executable" can be a binary program, any one of a million script types and other things as well. Hence the need for "#!/bin/bash".