When I think of the Unix approach that is based on text stream and the pipes that carry them, I think of telephony. (What a coinky-dink.) The Unix way is "in-b

When I think of the Unix approach that is based on text stream and the pipes that carry them, I think of telephony. (What a coinky-dink.) The Unix way is "in-band", where metadata (for telephony: signaling) is in the same stream (channel) as the data. It makes reinvention (upgrading) of the shell super difficult. Nobody can even agree precisely how to (for example) include column headers in a CSV stream. The other way is "out-of-band", where metadata/signaling is done in a parallel channel. Newer shells can try to approximate this by using JSON when the pipeline is appropriate. I kinda wish the latter (OOB) had taken hold back in the day.