[Kamq]

> Take McIlroy's shell script: if you add up the C code to implement each of those little languages, you're at about 10k lines of code to make that bit of code golf possible.

This is a fair point, but part of this has to be how battle tested the language in question is, right?

Bringing in a single language that's been run through its paces (bourne shell in this case) for text processing, seems like a much lower risk than bringing in a dozen different languages and hoping the places that they interface doesn't blow up (hope someone tried that particular combination before).