Nothing that a decent scripting language with a REPL and some decent libs can't provide you because that is essentially what this is. I, for one, am quite glad

Nothing that a decent scripting language with a REPL and some decent libs can't provide you because that is essentially what this is. I, for one, am quite glad that my shell does not pipe objects. Text-based transports have the wonderful property that they are suspend-able (i.e. save output to a file, transfer them to another machine load them from the file; something you can't do with objects without serialization) and consistently represented on the console and for the receiving process. Processes on my machine send and receive arbitrary byte streams. I have specialized tools for communicating with servers with specialized protocols. If you really want a shell AND a scripting language all at once, use something like IPython: http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/ http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/