I'll add that I enjoy using Common Lisp and Scheme REPL environments. I also really like Squeak as an interactive programming environment. Neither has replaced the old school Unix shell as my preferred command invocation environment, at least in my professional life.
I have the same experience, and I suspect it's because we haven't replicated the utilities in these environments. No one uses them as a replacement for shell because no one has done the work to use them as a replacement for shell.
Personally, I think Prolog is the right way to go, but I have this idea that I don't want to spend the rest of my life typing into a teletype emulator.
We kind of do on Windows, thanks PowerShell and PowerShell IDE.
> It also spreads the cpu utilization and memory usage across the commands that you use in the pipeline.
For example with Clojure you can use pmap and pcall to achieve that.
Despite its messiness, doing ad-hoc integration of command line tools to transform text is really handy. It also spreads the cpu utilization and memory usage across the commands that you use in the pipeline.