Li Haoyi just gave a talk at Scala by the Bay entitled "Beyond Bash", which details the shell scripting environment he's been working on that is hosted in a rei

Li Haoyi just gave a talk at Scala by the Bay entitled "Beyond Bash", which details the shell scripting environment he's been working on that is hosted in a reimplementation of the Scala REPL, called Ammonite. Slides for the talk: http://tinyurl.com/beyondbash http://tinyurl.com/beyondbash Docs: http://lihaoyi.github.io/Ammonite/ http://lihaoyi.github.io/Ammonite/ I wasn't at the talk, but I downloaded it and have been playing around with it. It's really fun! The path operations are all typed (ie, you can't combine relative and absolute paths in stupid ways), you get all of Scala to operate on files and the filesystem (if you know Scala, this is pretty huge), and it has a handy pipelining syntax that is effectively an extension of the shell `|` operator we all know and love: http://lihaoyi.github.io/Ammonite/#Extensions http://lihaoyi.github.io/Ammonite/#Extensions There are other niceties built in as well, like syntax highlighting and pretty printing, that gave me the impression that the author really cares about the UX of the software. It's not all academic/pure, in fact it appears to be the kind of pragmatic, practical thing that I wish Scala was known for. I highly recommend giving it a shot, especially if you already know Scala. I definitely will be giving it some time in the coming weeks.