I can't read the article now, but in my opinion the fact that it's so difficult to write robust shell scripts above a very basic level of complexity (e.g. do this, then do that, then do that, then quit) really means you should be scripting in perl/python/ruby/etc instead.
Yes, the overhead for anything quick and dirty is higher, but if you're writing libraries, you only have to write them once.
The only real benefit to writing something complex entirely in a shell script is if you can't control the environment it will run in, and you need it to run everywhere, and you can't make users install an interpreter, which are increasingly rare requirements, and even then you have to write it in `sh` anyway.