Well I think what BastardOperator is touching on is exactly the pain I have felt: Because of all the funny characters and syntax and semantics in Perl, it is difficult to create easy console access to Perl-Module functionality.

For example, based on my experiences with Net::FTP, and having had to write 5 or 6 lines of code for many common actions, I figured it was time to develop Net::FTP::Common, which provides one-line access to many common tasks that took 5-6 lines of Net::FTP (e.g., grepping a listing for a file, uploading a file, downloading a file).

Then, I wanted to be able to perform all of my Net::FTP::Common tasks from the shell, but since, it would be very difficult and traumatizing to new users to try to and access Net::FTP::Common using Perl syntax, so I was forced to write Net::FTP::Shell.

In languages with very few funny characters, ie where common datatypes are actually datatypes (in Perl a plethora of everyday things (dates, email, ip #'s, hostnames, URLS) are actually strings instead of types and require object-oriented syntax to access and use), the programming language and console access are equally easy to use.

The language I have found that allows me access to my programmed functionality as shell access without having to write my own shell parser everytime is REBOL, with TCL/Lisp a close second, except that it again does not export real-word data as first-class types, but instead as strings.