> No offense but that must be one of the dumbest ideas I have heard in a long time.
Thanks. This is not the first time I've been told that.
> The reason you write something in a shell script is because it is portable on all Unix systems.
This is definitely not my case. I write plenty of shell code at work, but rarely distribute it. It is just for arranging data around, preparing one-off experiments, and so on.
> Running a complicated shell script that calls out to Julia 1000 times makes absolutely NO SENSE!
I agree that this may be a rare use case, but it is legitimate nonetheless. Moreover, the best tools are those that can be used successfully in ways that the creator of the tool would find abhorrent.
> It is a completely contrived example with no practical application.
This was a concrete example actually. I had a shell script that cropped, denoised and registered a collection of a few thousand photos scattered in a directory tree. It was a four-line pipeline that called a few command line tools from imagemagick and gmic to do the image processing work. At one point, I realized that I had to apply an homography to the images (given by a 3x3 matrix that was stored as 9 numbers in a text file) to map them to a different coordinate system. This involved a 3x3 matrix multiplication for each image. I did this multiplication in julia, my favorite calculator. The running time of the whole thing went from 10 to 20 minutes. Doing the "correct" thing and rewriting everything in julia would be extremely painful.
> Besides when people say "calculator," I think most reasonable people assume an interactive system for doing calculations
When you say "CLI Calculator", you can also think about a calculator that you can call from your shell command line. This is the case for example for the classical calculators bc(1) and dc(1), which are non-interactive, and purposefully intended to be called inside loops in a shell script.