Some time ago I tried writing a terminal environment that would fit better for people familiar with JS and Python. I failed miserably, but I still think it would be a good idea.

http://xon.sh/ is something related, but my idea was to make more interesting use of pipes, like passing structured data.

Good to have these things. See also https://github.com/Russell91/pythonpy and https://github.com/alecthomas/pawk