the Unix shell has been quite static in recent decades; its a sign of success, sharing unstructured text through a pipe is good enough for most administration tasks and people got used to the many command line options of grep/sed/ps and friends.
is this really the best of all possible worlds? I think that its good that the shells get some new competition in the form of PowerShell - maybe some new ideas will come out of it (maybe like passing s-expressions or json around the pipe - something more structured so that we could do with fewer command line options - maybe)
doing structured data 'right' is difficult (right meaning uniform and expressive ways of handling it); historically it was easier to stick with unstructured text - but maybe there is a better way that would be easier to learn and handle.
(Well a major problem of structured data is that there are many possible ways of structuring - leading to more problems for the consumer of the data; maybe it was not adopted in system administration because there is not common/agreed upon culture of how to structure things).
is this really the best of all possible worlds? I think that its good that the shells get some new competition in the form of PowerShell - maybe some new ideas will come out of it (maybe like passing s-expressions or json around the pipe - something more structured so that we could do with fewer command line options - maybe)
doing structured data 'right' is difficult (right meaning uniform and expressive ways of handling it); historically it was easier to stick with unstructured text - but maybe there is a better way that would be easier to learn and handle.
(Well a major problem of structured data is that there are many possible ways of structuring - leading to more problems for the consumer of the data; maybe it was not adopted in system administration because there is not common/agreed upon culture of how to structure things).