The Strange Aversion Against Shells

I keep running into code that looks like this:

$command = "utility arg1 arg2";
FH = open("$command |");
while (<FH>) {
    if /regexp/ ....

or worse:

args = []
if opt.long: args.append("-l")
if opt.quiet: args.append("-q")
...
system(command, args)

Why are people so averse to actually writing shell scripts instead of embedding shell scripts into other scripting languages?

Yeah, so shells are 30 years old or more - and that's a problem, because? At least they're stable and ubiquitous. On Windows? Get CygWin - yeah, not perfect, but then again, you're on Windows, right?

It gets worse: people hate on old tools like GNU Make, only to create ant. Really? A dependency management language in XML where the execution portion is in java?

If I need a custom action and use Make, I write the rule and the dependencies, and then I write a <gasp> shell script indented by (oh noes) tabs. Done.

If I need a custom action in ant, I need a java IDE, a java build system (probably ant - with fun bootstrapping issues to go along), a deploy strategy to ensure that ant actually uses my plugin, and I still end up writing code looking strangely like shell scripts....

To be cool, I should precede that with exhaustive research on whether there already isn't a plugin that sort of kind of does what I need and think about whether I can live with the 80% solution when I can just write my 100% solution in as few as 3-4 lines of shell.

Of course shells aren't perfect - but for build tasks they are really good. They handle environments (which, btw, have both encapsulation and inheritance), I/O, subprocesses and file system manipulations with ease. If you do have complex data structures, nothing prevents you to write helper scripts to deal with them, or go the other way around and write shell script generators and at least be honest about it instead of hiding them behind system() or popen() calls.

Build systems would be so much simpler if people accepted shell as a valid tool instead of treating it like some embarrassing relative.