For all its syntactic sugar, dealing with files in python (which comprises probably 90% of what I open a shell for) still requires a fair amount of boilerplate.

For all its syntactic sugar, dealing with files in python (which comprises probably 90% of what I open a shell for) still requires a fair amount of boilerplate. Which is good for a general scripting language, but makes it poor for the the kind of tasks I expect of a shell.