Well, there are (good) reasons to write shell programs. The shell is everywhere (well, at least on Unix and POSIX systems), where as Perl, Python and Ruby aren't. The production environment of the project I'm currently working on doesn't have Perl, so writing tools and utilities for that in Perl isn't an option.

And let's not forget that to build Perl, you need to run Configure - which is a shell script.

Abigail