alt Hacker News> I want to make the terminal a special place for applications. The PTY’s in-band signalling (an unstructured byte stream with escape sequences) is a big problem. The Nushell ecosystem tries to fix it with another layer, but we need a fundamental improvement. Many people dislike the Microsoft ecosystem, but PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data.
I wish they would say more. The little nushell I used was a real pleasure to work with but they seem to imply there are limitations to the approach (one more layer ?). It seems the model to emulate is powershell but what does powershell do better than nushell ? I though it was essentially the same approach
Structured data as the communication medium between shell applications is so obviously a good thing, once you've used it, the Unix way of chopping up text with flags and formatting utilities seems barbaric. PowerShell got it half-right but blundered by talking in binary blobs of .NET objects instead of structured text; it was an understandable decision given how Microsoft worked at the time, but held it back from greatness.
But it's not clear how to get from here to there; Nushell doesn't seem to be catching on. I sometimes fantasize about adding two more standard streams, stdstructin and stdstructout, to go with stdin/stdout/stderr, which by informal or formal standard would write JSON (or whatever). Then coreutils and other programs could adopt them gradually and fall back to stdin/stdout whenever encountering a program not using them, and we could have gradual migration while keeping backward compatibility.