Yeah, the bash ecosystem looks fairly different with regards to dealing with structured data since jq became popular. Basically jq means that as long as you can

Yeah, the bash ecosystem looks fairly different with regards to dealing with structured data since jq became popular. Basically jq means that as long as you can safely get your input from whatever custom format into json, and from json to whatever output format, you can safely work with structured data. Incidentally, I think it would have been possible to use only `csvkit` commands and skip the format munging to and from json, but I have an allergy to working with csvs since the format is a bit underspecified and there exist "csv" files that break even the few rules the format is supposed to have. You would be horrified at some of the things I have seen that called themselves "csv". > In my experience, I can write a "proper" command line tool with all the bells & whistles using C/C++ in about a few thousand lines of code Yeah, in my experience trying to write command line tools in low level languages is an exercise in pain. I usually write new tools in Python, where similar to your experience writing a simple command is ~20 lines of code, ~10 of which is boilerplate that is the same for every command. That said, powershell does look pretty cool. And I see that it's possible to install on linux as well[1], and as far as I can tell even to write my commands in python[2], so it almost looks like "a unix-style shell but with types" which would be useful. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/instal... [2] http://pythonnet.github.io/ http://pythonnet.github.io/