[super_mario]

shell is a programming language. You are interactively programming and in a more efficient way too. You are telling the computer to do things for you (instead of clicking on pictures) or speaking in more verbose language.

So I don't really get your objection. Even if you programmed what you wanted computer to do in some other "real" language you would be doing exactly the same thing only in different syntax. And source code would still be even bigger bottleneck :D. Try writing python script to wget a file and extract it to local file system. I think you will find it's more time consuming :D.

[dllthomas]

A linguistics professor I was speaking with once put it (paraphrasing from memory): "With a shell, you have all the expressibility of a language. With pointy-clicky, you're reduced to pointing at things and grunting."