People keep on telling me that python is a "scripting language" but honestly I would rather use the shoddiest and most barebones shell you would give me than python if I had to make a script. It all boils to interfaces, and there are more programs, libraries, and daemons that have a shell interface as opposed to whatever other "better" language there is out there. Trying to write scripts with Python or ruby or whatever will just boils down to plumbing data between external programs in a less succinct syntax. What good is type safety, try/catch, and classes if all the tools that you're using are taking in and spitting out raw text anyway?
I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a better alternative. And once someone does come up with something better, it will be another few decades of waiting for it to catch on. Terminal emulation is dumb and weird, but there's just no better solution that's also compatible with existing software. Just look at any IDE as an example: visual studio, code blocks, whatever. Thousands of hours put into making all those fancy buttons menus and GUIs, and still the only feature that is worth using is the built-in terminal emulator which you can use to run a real text editor like vim or emacs.