Ruby and Python are pretty unwieldy for the kind of situations that are well-suited to shell scripts. It's a pain to spawn a command, a pain to make sure you ge

Ruby and Python are pretty unwieldy for the kind of situations that are well-suited to shell scripts. It's a pain to spawn a command, a pain to make sure you get the process's output in the right place, and just far more overhead than necessary. I agree, however, that classic shells are worse, because they lack many of the niceties expected in modern languages and have opaque, sensitive syntax. fish shell has made me pretty happy. It's a great middle ground. It makes no pretense at POSIX compatibility. Truly a shell for the 90s.