Lots of programs can communicate with JSON, XML, standard formats like that. If some legacy program outputs a non-standardized kind of output, that's a problem to be solved, not an inherent failure of shell scripting. There is no overarching successful solution to the problem of different programs using different data representations, but I don't blame this on shell; I work happily with shell scripts as do many many others. The same problem shows up the minute you want to use a Ruby module from Python, and rewriting everything in every language is not an economically viable solution.