Scripting languages still usually represents a substantial typing overhead compared to throwing together a pipeline on the command line with standard Unix tools for many simple tasks.

The moment I see I'll need to do something many times, I'll consider writing a script, and then I'll often pick Ruby. But for one-off stuff, the command line is often faster once you get comfortable with a handful Unix tools.

In fact I often find that even when I do things many times, the mental overhead of remembering "yet another script" is often high enough to make it faster to just re-compose the command line I want.

For example, I very frequently do some variation over "grep [some term] | sort | uniq -c | sort -n" to get a sorted list by number of occurrences of [some term], but the key part is "some variation", and that makes adding and remembering an alias less useful.

Another big consideration is that these tools are present on all or most machines many of us use.

For larger applications, having to install other packages is often no big deal, but for example I don't want to find myself dealing with an emergency and suddenly having to pull down tons of packages to use Ruby because I'm not comfortable with the tools that are already on the machine.