Shell programming through small cli tools was never meant to scale into massive complex software so you're comparing apples and bananas. Do one thing well and

Shell programming through small cli tools was never meant to scale into massive complex software so you're comparing apples and bananas. Do one thing well and text as the universal interface works well in the small for parsing files, doing sys admin tasks, gluing a few things together. That's what it's intended for. It's obviously the wrong tool to build a system in. Used in the right context they compose beautifully.