Aneurysm9_

That thoroughly misses the point. They could do both. There is zero reason to shrink the addressable market other than Apple not wanting to play with others.

The interface is not necessarily the content of the message conveyed by the interface. Lines of text std(in|out) is a well-defined interface. Some programs may go further and specify the format of messages passed on that interface. https://github.com/synacor/dtk is one such system that specifies (for most of its commands) tab-delimited records as the message format. It interfaces well with other elements of the UNIX ecosystem, however, because its interface is simply lines of text on std(in|out).

I'd suggest reading http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ to better understand why UNIX is the way that it is.

Just gonna leave this here. https://github.com/synacor/dtk

Its filter functions are Perl, but you could do something similar with JS if you were a masochist. No need to build a new shell, though.