I have just started going through the docs a bit. I am interested in 2 things. One, programs that interface with other commands -- essentially rewriting large shell programs in a "better" language. I saw the section on "external commands" and that looks very promising. Are there any other links or sample programs I can check out. Would Julia be just as good as say Ruby in this respect ?

Is there a readline interface ?

Second, I haven't yet come across an ncurses interface yet.

Thanks.

edit: Just came across your article "Shelling out sucks". | In my followup post, I will describe how Julia makes constructing and executing pipelines of external commands as safe as Python’s subprocess and as convenient as shelling out. I could not find a link to the followup. Do you have something ?