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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of simple things that can be connected in any way. I'm not so much a fan of "everything is a soup of bytes with unspecified encoding and unknown formatting".

It's an abstraction that held up quite well, but its starting to show its age.

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I fully agree... and yet... everyone who has tried to "fix" this has failed, at least in the sense of "attaining anything like shell's size and reach". Many have succeeded in the sense of producing working code that fixes this in some sense.

Powershell's probably the closest to success, because it could be pushed out unilaterally. Without that I'm not sure it would have gotten very far, not because it's bad, but again because nobody else seems to have gotten very far....

100% agree. Having to extract information with regular expressions is a waste of time. If the structure of the data was available, you would have type safety / auto-completion. You could even have GUIs to compose programs.

Structured data flows in pipes too. Json can even be line oriented. GUI programming fails when you get past a few hundred “lines” of complexity. What I’d love to see is a revolution of shells and terminals to more easily work and pull from piped data.

I hear what you're saying.

However, how can you ensure the output type of one program matches the input type of another?

Allow programs to specify the type of data they can consume and the type of the data they emit. This is how powershell does it (using the dotnet type system).

And the problem is how can you ensure the output type of one program matches the input type of another.

A program emits one type, and the other program accepts another.

Something will be needed to transform one type into another. Imagine doing that on the command line.

Cat file1 | convert | dest

Having GUIs compose programs seems antithetical to the idea of shell scripts which are often thrown together quickly to get things done. Personally, I view shell scripting as a "good enough" and if you need more structure then you change your tools.

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