[JohnBooty]

Nushell does not seem like a violation of the unix philosophy, or at least the version of it that I like best.

"Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."

Perhaps I'm wrong, isn't nushell simply adding one more dimension?

Instead of a one-dimensional array of lines, the standard is now... a two-dimensional array of tabular data. Perhaps it is not strictly a "text stream" but this does not seem to me to be a violation of the spirit of the message.

Simple line-based text streams are clearly inadequate IMO. 99.99% of all Unix programs output multiple data fields on one line, and to do anything useful at all with them in a programmatic fashion you wind up needing to hack together some way of parsing out those multiple bits of data on every line.

    maybe check out Powershell

I left Windows right around the time PS became popular, so I never really worked with it.

It seems like overkill for most/all things I'd ever want to do. Powershell objects seem very very powerful, but they seemed like too much.

Nushell seems like a nice compromise. Avoids the overkill functionality of Powershell.

[pmarreck]

Semantically, a one-dimensional list/array of “things” can be trivially transposed into a series of lines with a linebreak separator, but I don’t think the same holds true for a “list of lists” (2-dimensional data) or a “list of lists of lists” (3D data) etc. At least without a standard begin-end list delimiter that allows nesting.

Just thinking about a way that perhaps an old tool can be “wrapped” to be tricked into working with 2+-dimensional data by somehow divvying up the 2+ dimension input data into concurrent 1-dimensional streams, but this seems to require a way to represent more than 1 dimension of data without breaking existing utilities (unless there was, like, a wrapper/unwrapper layer that handled this...)