Yes and no: from a theoretical point of view the shell language is Turing-complete, so in principle there is nothing you couldn't do given enough resources.

From a practical standpoint, these resources are limited and the theoretical possibility to do something doesn't imply it is also wise to do so. High-level-languages, like Corona already noted, do not have to offer more possibilities, it is enough that they are usually better (faster, smaller, ...) in doing it which makes them preferable for some tasks. They generally also afford more effort to do something (a script in shell is usually written faster than the same as a C program because the "building blocks" are bigger), which makes the shell languages on turn preferable for some other tasks.

This might or might not be a good idea. "/dev/random" is the front-end of a driver, which collects noise from device drivers (and some other next-to-random events, implementations vary) to fill a pool of "randomness" (called the "entropy pool"), which can be accessed (via "/dev/random") as source for random numbers of high quality. As this pool is accessed i is depleted and once it runs empty read-access is blocked as long as it takes to refill this pool.

So, yes, "/dev/random" might be slow, but it delivers constant high quality. "/dev/urandom", on the other hand, works similar, but the random numbers are generated by a pseudo-random-number generator. The device will not block like "/dev/random", but once you exhaust the entropy pool you get random numbers of considerable lower quality than from "/dev/random".

So, both these devices have their uses, you will have to decide which one is sufficient for your work. For high-quality cryptography probably "/dev/urandom" won't suffice, while as source for the dice in a game program it might be perfectly OK.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

PS: The Amiga had a very powerful script language itself: (A)REXX. It serves the same purpose on IBM mainframes the shell serves on Unix systems. You might want to give it a try.