Granted, shell is useful for concise interactive one-liners. Granted, Java is a terrible replacement for shell. But there's no kind of programming where shell is better than Perl, Python or Ruby - "big languages" which, unlike Java, were designed to be useful for scripting by people who aren't full-time programmers. Because they are "big languages" they also have the property that you can build bigger things on them, starting from your messy prototypes. It's better not to even try that with shell or Excel.