I'm not saying you should do it my way. If you felt offended or whatever, I'm sorry, that was definitely not the point. I just wanted to discuss your style.

I use interractive shell scripting a lot actually, and I tend to "improvise" them within interactive sessions, rather than saving them in my toolbox. Sometimes the logic is just too complex or to random, and interactive use is indeed best.

The fact I don't find shell scripting suitable for "real" programs, is because its structure is too simple, and not safe enough. It also lacks some basic constructs that make it hard tl deal woth complex data structure.

I'm talking about POSIX shell only. I won't mention bashisms et al. here because I don't want too :)
There are no array types, quote escaping seems random, and implementation specific, arithmetic is barely handled, ... Add on top on that the builtin VS. binary problem and you get a language that is a pain to "program" in.
In my mind, shell scripting should be there to help external programs interact with each others, not be a program by itself.

That being said, it's a really simple language that has the biggest "libraries" available through external programs, so it is definitely the quickest way to get started with programming!