&gt; Can you give a shell script example of something that perl&#x2F;python&#x2F;ruby&#x2F;nodejs can&#x27;t do?<p>Install perl&#x2F;python&#x2F;ruby <i>and</i> nodejs -- requiring just the shell to be installed?<p>Snark aside (it&#x27;s not <i>only</i> snark - pretty much every system will have something like a posix shell), proper posix portable shell is hard - it&#x27;s an old gnarly language -- but it&#x27;s what we&#x27;ve got. And with a bit of discipline and good practices -- it doesn&#x27;t have to be bad. That said, a lot of real-world shell scripts <i>are</i> bad.<p>I tend to agree with the overall sentiment; shell isn&#x27;t a great language. As soon as you start to mix awk (which awk is that, do you need GNU awk?), sed and perhaps a bit of egrep (or grep -E -- are both available? Does it accept only BSD-style parameters?) -- one should consider moving &quot;up&quot;.<p>And for eg: setting up a python package&#x2F;program -- I&#x27;d generally prefer a python script -- hopefully one that handles different file-paths (eg: &#x2F; vs \ ) and other cross-platform stuff.  If you already depend on python, why <i>add</i> dependency on shell?