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I mean... isn't that what is already happening, the shell is the scripting language, and compiled binaries that mung text are the library functions.

Unix/Unixlike operating systems aren't perfect, but they get the job done.

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Moreover, something rarely mentioned, multiple processes and pipes can give you some free parallelism courtesy of the scheduler.

The downer is that every function call in this system has only string parameters.

That's because this is the way they thought back then. You can trivially pass json data between processes and make a coherent structured system. Nobody does it though.

jq has >20k stars on GitHub.

I use it mostly for little cli utilities, so maybe it isn’t an exact refutation of your claim.

[0] https://github.com/stedolan/jq

Sure, but I think the bigger problem is complete systems. Look at a usual Linux box. It has a bunch of files, all with their custom syntax, and you parse them with error-prone shell commands. If everything used json, everyone's lives would've been so much better.

Independent programs using json is a step in the right direction though.

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