This all looks awfully familiar, even though I'm primarily in the embedded space. >In Linux, the administration protocol is usually some ad-hoc text format and

This all looks awfully familiar, even though I'm primarily in the embedded space. >In Linux, the administration protocol is usually some ad-hoc text format and SIGHUP, in Windows it's Powershell, It's the same everywhere if you're liberal about the word "text". > can I reliably get a lightweight IDE to tell me what "echo swap > /dev/mouse" does, vs "mouse.swapButtons()" where mouse is a typed variable? So one of those is doubtless a lower primitive than the other; exchanging mappings is just that. An "IDE" just exposes the mappings in some human readable form. If the mapping is 'C' source, that's one way. If its 'C' source that calls ioctl() it's another... Have you ever looked at SNMP? With its ASN.1 MIBS? The metadata for the name space is specified there. Now, the BER encoded UDP PDUs are anything but ASCII but that's just a tools problem, again. Using those MIBs you can basically treat a client on the requester as a shell using ASCII names. It's a bit like JSON the hard way. You can do more sophisticated things but that's just molecules made of atoms. > This needs to be done as an operating system - a complete set of tools which ... It's just a stack of shells. So meta the shells and Bob's yer oyster. It's not that simple yet it sort of is... For a variety of reasons, I think of these as seperate appliances. > ... hard work to build entire new user experiences from ... Yup.