Shell programming terrifies me. There is something about writing a simple shell script that is just much, much more unpleasant than writing a simple C program, or a simple Common Lisp program, or a simple Mips assembler program. Is it trying to remember what the rules are for all the different quotes? Is it having to look up the multi-phased interaction between filename expansion, shell variables, quotation, backslashes and alias expansion? Maybe it's having to subsequently look up which of the twenty or thirty flags I need for my grep, sed, and awk invocations. Maybe it just gets on my nerves that I have to run two complete programs simply to count the number of files in a directory (ls | wc -l), which seems like several orders of magnitude more cycles than was really needed.