If doing even simple things requires looking up documentation, why does it matter whether the shell script is long or short?
Spending extra time doing simple things — because you need to Google e.g. "how to pass multiple space-separated arguments from a string to a command" — is also a waste of time.
Because the shell is available everywhere. A programming language needs to be installed first to be of any use. I still understand that there is a need for a simple command processor that is independent of a programming language for simple tasks.
