"Worse is better" isn't for everyone.
"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
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.
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...)
There's no real alternative for many profesionals, if they want to be employable.
Maybe we should accept this fact and try to make everyone's life easier than be stuck up and push people away.
There's no law that says that Unix tools can't be extended.
And heck, basic POSIX tools violate so many Unix principles...
I don't write complex scripts in shell anymore because it's insanity. But ad-hoc loops and crap like that... hell yeah. At least a few a day. Sometimes dozens.
People need to be reminded, I think, that shell isn't a programming language first. It's a user interface. And when I look at Powershell scripts and other things of that nature and think about living in Powershell day in and day out I don't see the big pay-off over something like fish.
'Is this going to make it so I can get my work done faster?'
'Is this going to be more pleasant to use as a primary interface for a OS?'
When I go into fish or zsh and use curl to grab json and 'jq' to get a idea of how to use the API in python or node...
versus running 'curl' in powershell against some random API I have never used before..
I get the distinct impression that 'This is fucking garbage' in that It would take me a lot longer to figure out how to use powershell in a useful way then the time I would save by doing so in the long run.
Unix follows the KISS principle, and that is key for success. Albert Einstein said: "Keep things as simple as possible but not too simple". In that sense Unix and Posix are well done. However, that doesn't mean that good ideas like Nushell are not welcome.
[0] https://github.com/nickcox/cd-extras#navigate-even-faster