[chubot]

Yes I think you're expressing the same sentiment as Knuth, who I quoted in my blog here:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/12/27.html

I tend to agree and most of my shell is either written from scratch, or copying and adapting small piees of code that are known to work. I take ownership of them rather than using them as libraries.

That is even the case for the Python interpreter, which is the current subject of the blog.

I'm not quite sure, but I think OMeta falls even shorter than the typical piece of software. I'm not saying it's not worthwhile -- it seems like a good piece of research software and probably appropriate for their goals. But to say it generalizes is a different claim.