Good point, except if an important part of your complex script is really just plumbing the outputs of one program to the inputs of another. Because that's what

Good point, except if an important part of your complex script is really just plumbing the outputs of one program to the inputs of another. Because that's what shell scripting excels at. Calling an external process is a first-class citizen in shell, whereas it is a somewhat clunky thing (or at the very least, much more verbose) to do in any other languages.