dead languages

Well, actually you *can* do full-blown parsing and bidirectional pipeline stuff in the shell
(I've done it). However, bugs and differences between shells make it agonisingly difficult to
do anything really complicated in portable shell. You could decide e.g. to just go with zsh
because it's widespread, flexible, only has one consistent implementation and works everywhere
useful (that's what I ended up doing) but if you're doing that you might as well go with
Python or Perl anyway, as the same things are true of them.