[bregma]

It seems to me the solution to the problem posed in the article -- and to the wishes of many of the commenters here -- is to use JavaScript as your shell. The missing piece is an app that presents a text UI with a JavaScript REPL and that renders the DOM inline.

Missing file, device, and information manipulation applications that shell programmers string together would be replaced by JavaScript functions from a library. If you really want JSON, use the JavaScript Serialized Object Notation to serialize JavaScript objects in JavaScript.

Why do people write "what I want is..." articles and comments when they could be writing solutions that scratch their itch and meet their needs?