I guess shell scripting and the standard commands are convenient interfaces to a lot more functionality. The interactive use (and pipes) tend to make the linear

I guess shell scripting and the standard commands are convenient interfaces to a lot more functionality. The interactive use (and pipes) tend to make the linear processing super terse and easy (but lots of other things become annoying). In a type-safe language, it’s typically impossible to specify a function which can do as many things as (eg) sort can, and which doesn’t require specifying a huge amount of default arguments on every invocation. Therefore you end up with a limited function, a huge annoying function, or many small functions. In any case, changing from one kind of sort to another (eg how to sort things, what to sort, how to order them, whether to keep unique elements, whether to be stable, whether to take multiple inputs, whether to assume the inputs are sorted (so just merge), and so on) becomes difficult whereas with a tweak-in-many-ways command like sort it is easy. In a language like CL with optional arguments and no types, this problem can be less hard but whereas sort will likely work fone for a large dataset, your favourite library function may not. (In particular it almost definitely won’t use on-disk storage when needed or support parallelism. Partly note that storing objects from your favourite language to disk is probably hard but if you only work on lines of text it’s easy). The other big difference is the data types. The data type of shell programs is basically a sequence of lines, each of which is sometimes broken up into one or more records by some other separator. In many languages the sequence operations are all about getting the nth element, or extending them, or changing elements, or deleting them, or splitting the sequence up into other sequences. And these operations typically identify the elements by the position. In shell scripts, many of these operations are unavailable or not used. One basically only iterates forwards, processing each element, and one almost never thinks about the position of the element in the sequence. (c)split exists but isn’t commonly used. Lots of work in a typical language is converting one data type to another, or extracting bits of it, or doing data type-specific things. In shell these don’t really exist (eg you don’t sort as dates, you write your dates like 2019-09-28 and sort them like strings), and so data is simple, and because extraction is flexible (typically a field number or byte positions) lots of the bureaucracy of changing data types is omitted. These things all often lead to shell scripts being unreliable. But also resilient, flexible and “sufficient”. By “sufficient” I mean that they can do things well enough that the cost for a long term, thorough, or “proper” solution isn’t justified.