[blakeyrat]

That's great, but how much data do you work with, day-to-day, that is best represented as text streams? For me, the answer is "virtually none". Heck, most of the stuff I work with, day-to-day, can't even be represented meaningfully in a text stream. (Editing video, for example.)

[wicket]

For me, the answer is "plenty", but that's neither here or there. Everyone has their own use case and I daren't say yours isn't valid.

Video editing tends to done in applications, of course that's not to say video data can't already be piped. I once set up a screencast using gstreamer to convert /dev/video to an HTML 5 compatible video format which I then redirected to a named pipe which could then be opened from a HTML file page in a web browser. The UNIX shell is already very powerful. You haven't stated what it is you want to do with video editing that is either difficult or not currently possible but would be possible with this new shell, so I'm not sure that I really understand the point that you are trying to make.

There is nothing wrong with creating an alternative shell. I can see the need for something like this. PowerShell for example works very well. My main gripe with this project is that the author has named it "Next generation UNIX shell" which suggests that it is intended to be a replacement rather than an alternative. In my humble opinion, it tosses the simplicity out of the window that makes UNIX, UNIX.

To quote Dennis Ritchie, "UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." I'm no genius, but I get it.