It's worth noting that the traditional UNIX text-based utilities are designed for reporting to a user. Using text to generate reports is the most intelligent thing they could have done, because humans universally process text. It's not a superior programming environment, but it's a superior reporting environment, which is helpful when you're trying to reverse-engineer some third-party ELF binary or debug why your shared memory object sometimes causes clients to crash. That we sometimes take strings from our reports and pass them into our shell is accidental.