Shell are old classic human-computer UIs, so they are battle tested, well known, daily used by almost anyone who can write a script. That means: scripting is na

Shell are old classic human-computer UIs, so they are battle tested, well known, daily used by almost anyone who can write a script. That means: scripting is natural for a vast cohort of users, it's natural because while weird in language terms it's a glue of a set of known and frequently used tools. There are much more shell users than Go, Python, ... programmers. Also those who happen to be programmers normally use certain languages, typically more than one, typically far more diverse than just most used shells, for a certain kind of activity, like programming in a team a not-that-small project. As a result their mindset is not "quickly do something/quickly automate something for me, myself and I only, on my own desktop" but to be part of a larger game with need to cooperate, produce code easy to read by others, create a set of entry points for integration etc. Those programmers are not all, but mostly also shell users and they tend to use the shell not just for specific large projects but also for quick, simple&dirty personal stuff. So as non-programmers who use the shell they know and use it daily. In the past we have had perhaps better tools, like Smalltalk on Xerox desktops or Emacs/zmacs lisp on LispM BUT their actual public is next to 0 and modern Emacs-ers are on modern desktops not LispM and they are typically born on modern desktop so they know the shell and in Emacs they'll wrap anyway countless shell-centric tools so end the end a script is often quicker and simpler...