> So the solution is Unix or (God help us) Win32 forever? I think the nature of the unix user space is one of the things that could stand improving. How about doing something a bit more structured than piping bytes (ascii? UTF8? Latin1? Some binary format? Who knows!) around? Or making tools that don't run in one-shot mode when that's not how they're used (compilers, etc.)?

The solution is incrementally improving these things. What you're talking about is absolutely the kind of thing I'm interested in. Arguably PowerShell is one piece of the right direction. Show me a better way with compilers etc. and I'm interested (I work in Scala and compile time is a big issue, but I couldn't stand to have SBT as my framework).

> This need not throw everything away that we have today. Why not make the equivalent of higher level bindings over a C API for command line programs? Or maybe any of a hundred other options that might improve over what we have now? Is unix really the end stage evolution for user space?

If you've got a way to introduce one of those things incrementally, I'm interested.

I'm (very slowly) working towards having time to build the hobby OS I've been dreaming about for years. I've been especially inspired by Plan 9, BeOS, and seL4. I love simple, powerful things.

At this point, any new OS that wants to breaks away from Unix/Windows and hopes to gain mass adoption, will need to come with an Unix/Windows emulation layer built-in.