[triclops200]

I like the point raised by the author here about the power of elisp in the shell. For context, I've used emacs for well over a decade and write a good bit of elisp most weeks. However, I ended up finding elisp to be the wrong language for replacing a shell: it removes a lot of simplicity/convention for not enough reward, imo: it's just the wrong abstraction because elisp's most natural transformations are very stateful and buffer based, and, additionally, it really doesn't provide that much expanded capability in the end (and this is despite the fact that I'm one of those people who would absolutely never leave my emacs environment even for web browsing if I could feasibly make it work consistently for the kinds of things I need).

However, despite disliking python, I found https://xon.sh/ to be really excellent and provides a lot of the benefits of eshell, but better, in my humble opinion: it has a well-enough structured base language that is essentially already built to be a library glue-code language, which works really well with the unix philosophy that traditional shells utilize (a good library is just a tool that does a thing really well). It's really nice to just do things like this example

    from somelib import process_image #returns a file name that it saved to
    for f in $(some_executable_that_prints_a_file_list).strip().split("\n"):
      img = cv2.imread(f)
      cp @(process_image(img)) publish_dir
      make publish

It feels a lot like an extension of old shells to me rather than a complete replacement.