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And write unix-style cli tools that can be piped to and from. Make them eat and spit something structured like JSON.

Not as a primary interface. By all means provide a wrapper around the library that does that, for users to use on the command line, but there should be an underlying library for other programs to use.

Isn’t powershell a generalized version of that idea?

It's a specialized version of that idea.

Problem with libraries are that they tie the user to a specific language/OS. A cli tool eating and spitting ASCII/UTF-8 is about as cross platform as it gets.

No actually, it tries to be a kitchen sink and is the opposite of the UNIX concept of pipelines with small purpose built utilities.

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