About your general point, I think that's only because all the shell
commands are available by default. To delete a file, there's simply
"rm". A general purpose language would normally require more code to
delete a file, and that additional code is perceived as "noise". The
thing to do would be to reduce that noise to almost nothing.
There's been a number of experiments to replace the shell with scheme,
perl, or python. I'm not sure how successful they were for particular
people, but they didn't quite take. My speculation is that general
languages are "too powerful" for shell scripting.
First, there's not really a high need for it. There might be many people
who dislike sh, but sh works "well enough", and there's no pressure to
replace it. And sh is standard and available anywhere.
Second, an alternative absolutely had to be standard to be successful,
because else you couldn't "compose" the various utilities to write
larger programs, like in sh. Or you had to start processes and pass
command line arguments and use stdin/stdout, but sh is better at this.
