[underwater]

If I want to work with e output of ls, why do I need to manually parse fragile strings?

It would be neat to have basic stringable primatives, like maps and tables, that scripts could write and read.

[ricardobeat]

You can't approach things from a programmer's perspective when thinking about interfaces. I mean, I see your point, but how would that make it any more user-friendly? More powerful, sure, but it would require an extra layer of abstraction, which is going in the directly opposite way of user-friendliness.

Besides, you already have all that right now, by using the dynamic language of your choice + file system APIs.