[jschwartzi]

I would not be half as capable of troubleshooting in my work as I am if I couldn't parse random byte strings on the command line. That alone is why I use Unix for embedded development. Powerful things are often dangerous. For instance, consider nuclear power, motor vehicles, rocket engines, medicine, plastics, et. al..

So how do you provide the same level of capability as C and UNIX but without mixing data and commands? Is there some alternative paradigm that is just as powerful but safe?

[BruceM]

Watch the Mathematica-backed StrangeLoop 2014 keynote by Stephen Wolfram. That's one way to think about it. There are others like how things work on the Lisp Machine (and somewhat similarly in CLIM).