Maybe I'm just old hat, but all the examples given I immediately thought of their *NIX equivalent. This doesn't appear to do anything above and beyond what our current tooling gives us (except perhaps 30 years less development).
Not sure if it's enough to get node installed everywhere I go, though.
And yes, it's a visual program, in that you operate on grid of cells.
Arguments, parameters, pattern matching, redirection, piping.
Surprisingly, this wasn't enough so Bourne became defacto in Unix v7.
Indeed, Thompson shell was small and clean, but it wasn't a spartan as you might think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_shell [2] http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/sh [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_shell