[coldtea]

True. I'm not against a DSL for working with CLI programs, pipes, output streams, processes, etc. Just that the shell as we know it is not the optimal (or even close to optimal) example of that.

Something like ZSH and the modern Fish shell showed how much traditional shells can improve, but we also need some better primitives, and more controlled experience.

Oh, and they should NOT be based on emulating 40+ year old teletypes anymore, except as part of a "legacy" mode.

[catdog]

Totally agree, the concept is nice and really useful but its implementation is for a large part really a big pile of fragile and confusing hacks. Most of the power comes of powerful tools like find, sed, awk (being a programming language on its own), etc. The language gluing them together is nicely compact but apart from that very disappointing. Also the everything is a string approach has its limitations. A python script may sometimes be longer but a lot less riddled with annoying corner cases.