Sometimes it's better to write something in a more advanced language, but for small tasks it's hard to beat the overhead of a shell! There are crossover points

Sometimes it's better to write something in a more advanced language, but for small tasks it's hard to beat the overhead of a shell! There are crossover points (varying by person) where a scripting language is preferable to a shell, and where a strongly-typed language is preferable to a dynamically-typed language.