[pandalicious]

It seems like the concepts are orthogonal though. The reason powershell works is that it replaced the entire shell toolchain with object-oriented equivalents. Without that you're fundamentally limited because your inputs are still plain text, so you're still doing the equivalent of awk/sed scripts to transform text into structured data.

[zokier]

That aligns pretty much with my conclusion that to make an useful object shell, I'd be essentially rewriting the whole userland and probably some kernel bits too (/proc and /sys etc). So basically building a completely new OS on top of Linux kernel. I wouldn't expect such project to be very popular..

[amyjess]

For quite a while now, I've fantasized about creating an object-oriented toy OS with an OO shell and something akin to Classic Mac OS's resource forks. As much information as possible would be stored as OO data structures in alternate file streams with native tooling to query them.

It would need to be based on Illumos and not Linux, though... IIRC, the only existing open-source filesystem that supports anything akin to a resource fork is ZFS, and the Linux kernel doesn't have the syscalls readily access it (ZFS implements extended attributes as forks, but the kernel has really tight limitations on what can be done with xattrs, much tighter than what ZFS can do).

It's just a fantasy, though, and not something I have the skills or the time to do.

[pjmlp]

Using the same concepts as the REPL on Interlisp-D, Symbolics, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar, Oberon environments.

Which kind of makes Windows, with VS, .NET and Powershell, the closest to those environments.

[nailer]

Agreed, you're still scraping, but being familiar to people used to scraping is a decent way to convert those people into using structured data.