Even erlang can be a shell and wrap around the system toolset making your basic shell scripts work concurrently.
For everyday usage the core ash shell is perfect for scripting and zsh csh or korn for interactive usage.
In my experience, most people have great difficulty correctly writing a simple loop to renames a set of files in a directory. I sumultaneously appreciate UNIX philosophy, and think the shell can be much improved by moving away from POSIX.
This is where some of the warts on a higher level than syntax come in, though, to be fair. Your example above fails in confusing -- and maybe even dangerous, depending on the command at the end -- ways if there's spaces in the filenames. One thing I would like would be a more rigid sense of arguments vs. strings and how they come out of such situations. Having to add -print0 to find and --null to xargs to make it safe for that situation is tedious and unfriendly.
Yes, that's one of the problems I'm trying to solve :)
Powershell solves this by having pipelines pass .NET objects, but I found them too heavyweight.
Here's a comparison of code to do the same thing written in Ruby:
Dir['**/*.py'].map{|f| File.readlines(f).length }.inject(:+)
find . -name '*.py' | xargs cat | wc -l
I ran them on Python 2.7's library directory and my version counted four lines more – I didn't investigate, but I think yours missed lines when cating files without trailing newline. I'd argue that's a bug in your code :)
xs.filter(p).map(f)
filter p xs | map f
map f $ filter p xs
xs # filter p # map f
filter p xs # map f
import pipe
find(name='*.py') | xargs(cat) | wc().lines
This is kind of the point.
Also, you miss one particularly elegant aspect of shell programming: the pipeline. It's a powerful facility of concatenative programming, but most people haven't realize it. Try to write "find . -name '*.py' | xargs cat | wc -l" in other languages. You end up either with some parentheses or intermediate variables or a loop, and in any case, much longer code.