Which is well and good, until you've got to recompile them on a checkout, or figure out what the hell they're doing, or get bitten by stupid bugs that only live at the low-level.
:(
That, and the lack of a sufficiently-abstract concept of strings.
To wit, let's get the length of two strings in Ruby and C.
Ruby:
("aha" + "oho").length
char buffer[1024]; // lol i hope this doesn't overflow
memset(buffer,0,1024);
strcat(buffer, "aha");
strcat(buffer, "oho");
return strlen(buffer);
Oh, and is that string length including the null terminator (no)? And why do we even care about null terminators unless we're doing low-level memory frobbing?
Anyways, imagine that sort of arcana multiplied across every string operation in your dumb little script. It's awful.
strlen("ahaoho")
The only real case for a short C utility is if the heart of what you're doing is a single system or library call that isn't so readily accessible in Python, Perl or shell.