[vinceguidry]

This is what it comes down to to me too. Using the shell to do programming seems to me like putting your job on hard mode.

When I had to do a lot of data processing at my last job, I started building up tools in Ruby. If I had time, I'd hack the workflow so that the next time I needed it, I could just run the tool from the command line.

Eventually I had a pluggable architecture that I could use to pull data from any number of sources and mix it with any other data. Do that with a shell? Why?

[DSpinellis]

The advantage of using the shell are the hundreds of powerful command-line tools you can use. Increasingly, there are Perl/Python/Ruby packages that offer similar functionality, but these require some ceremony to use and therefore prohibit rapid prototyping and experimentation.