Monad: Microsoft's new shell

Before you bash (ha! get it?) Microsoft's new shell (OMG! they discovered teh CLI!!!11) take a look at these two videos. You'll see that it's much more than just bash on Win32. In fact, if it ever catches on, it'll be Unix's turn to play catch-up, because some parts of it are pretty damn amazing.

The whole point of Monad is that it's not just text, it's objects. So, unlike Unix, where you work with a command and then filter its output, the output of Monad, while looking like text, is actually pointers back to the real thing, so instead of just doing a Unix-style command | filter | filter, you can say "OK, run this command, now of the things it output, go back and tell me this and this about them." Like, "Of these things that are running, tell me which five are using the most CPU time, then tell me the version of each, and how much memory they're using."

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