I think you misunderstand what a shell is. All these apps run within a _terminal_, the shell merely invokes them.
The article's headline made me a little excited to see some cool bash hackery (there's a lot of functionality packed into bash, see its colossal manpage), but when I saw it was just the usual debugger/patch/etc routine I was disappointed.
By the standards of this post's title, I could say that I have written huge pieces of software with "just a shell". In fact, the foundations of modern computing could be said to have been built with "just a shell". (ie, before they had GUIs) See how silly it sounds?
The article's headline made me a little excited to see some cool bash hackery (there's a lot of functionality packed into bash, see its colossal manpage), but when I saw it was just the usual debugger/patch/etc routine I was disappointed.
By the standards of this post's title, I could say that I have written huge pieces of software with "just a shell". In fact, the foundations of modern computing could be said to have been built with "just a shell". (ie, before they had GUIs) See how silly it sounds?