When my shell program gets longer than a few lines, it's time to break it into some makefile targets with intermediate files. I have in the past written a mode

When my shell program gets longer than a few lines, it's time to break it into some makefile targets with intermediate files. I have in the past written a moderate size program in Powershell (installer for a program which needed a lot of configuration for a lot of components and got installed into a lot of different environments). And while that probably wasn't the best approach in hindsight, it wasn't actually that awful an experience. It's not a million miles off writing a moderate size JavaScript program, except that it has an actual module system. I wish they hadn't chosen dynamic scope though, nor the silly array result squashing behaviour. Also the IIS 7 Powershell Provider - that was bad. (Or a proper language is good too.)