Its nonsense. They interoperate just as well as any other programs in UNIX. You can pipe stdin to them, pipe their output to other programs, or invoke the shell

Its nonsense. They interoperate just as well as any other programs in UNIX. You can pipe stdin to them, pipe their output to other programs, or invoke the shell or other programs. The fact that they have libraries that don't require integration through text streams doesn't take anything away from the text processing interfaces and programs. Shell scripts have their place, and UNIX is beautiful, but that doesn't mean everything has to work this way.