Speaking of shells, I wish there were a shell inspired by python, able to conveniently use python libraries (perhaps even auto-import them), but with the convenience features of common shells. I can never remember the ghastly syntax of bash.
Maybe the now defunct pysh profile of ipython [1] is close to what you want. (It's defunct because it is mostly unneccesary in recent versions of ipython, that page shows how to get most (all?) of the functionality it used to provide.)
For Perl instead of Python there are psh [2] and zoidberg [3].
