TermKit[1] was a proposal that tried to fix some of those problems by adding two new channels (separating terminal in/out from stdin/stdout data pipes) and using MIME-types (particularly JSON) to the latter.
It got a lot of flack, and I don't agree with everything the author proposes, but I think that part could definitively be improved.
The problem, of course, is backward compatibility: even if you can reimplement and/or wrap the core utils, what about the thousands CLI programs in each distro's repository? You'll end up with an hybrid beast that doesn't really do anything well.
It got a lot of flack, and I don't agree with everything the author proposes, but I think that part could definitively be improved.
The problem, of course, is backward compatibility: even if you can reimplement and/or wrap the core utils, what about the thousands CLI programs in each distro's repository? You'll end up with an hybrid beast that doesn't really do anything well.
[1]: http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/