What I mean is that shell speaks paths, pipes, and processes natively, and you can creatively use tools that are "just there". Example: http://www.oilshell.org

What I mean is that shell speaks paths, pipes, and processes natively, and you can creatively use tools that are "just there". Example: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/09/19.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/09/19.html It's an analogy, not a precise statement. It could be made more precise by using Oil as the center of a container-based "semi-distro", i.e. a distro that does everything that's not hardware related. I guess a little like the complement to what CoreOS was doing (or is?). (This is a project I've been thinking about for awhile; anyone should feel free to contact me if they've done something like that or have ideas. It's related to the dev tools problems described in the blog post.)