Back in college I used a scripting language I developed (on my own time, had an interest in it) as a shell (which I turned in as a class project for Unix System

Back in college I used a scripting language I developed (on my own time, had an interest in it) as a shell (which I turned in as a class project for Unix Systems Programming). Unix commands (the actual command, not the output) could be stored in variables, they could be combined (via a pipe; I'm checking the source right now, and while I only piped STDOUT, adding a pipe for STDERR would be trivial) and redirection of STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR was supported. And 15 years later, I still don't use it. The shell really is easier to use on a daily basis than most scripting languages (and yes, this does include Perl). Yes, I could type 'ls <enter>' and get a directory listing. But what about of a different directory? In a shell, it's 'ls /tmp' (for example). I want to see if a particular email got delivered? 'grep 70333248A03 /var/log/mail.log'. Unless the scripting language makes it this trivial to issue simple commands, you probably won't be using it as a shell for very long.