alt Hacker NewsI think the point was more that it's hard to compose shell utilities to make something new that's not supported out of the box. Instead you do have to write an entirely new utility and use that.
That said having key/value semantics and not just stream of bytes would make the shell much more versatile, at the cost of making it bigger.
That's not what the linked article is saying. The point made in the article is that the 'uniq' utility couples together two unrelated concepts--sorting and frequency counting--and this coupling forces you to write more complex code, compared to the version where frequency counting is decoupled from sorting.
All of this is completely correct, but it has nothing to do with bash vs. Clojure. The same decoupling can easily be achieved in either language.