Dagger: A shell for the container age

The Unix shell is over 50 years old, but it still defines how programmers use their computers. We type a few words in a terminal, and milliseconds later an ephemeral factory comes online: the Unix pipeline. Data streams through a network of simple programs working concurrently, like robots on the factory floor, executing a computational choreography we composed seconds ago. Its job done, the factory vanishes. Onto the next command. That loop built the internet, and still runs it today. The design principles of Unix are timeless: write simple programs, compose them with standard interfaces. But 50 years is a long time… the software stack has expanded, and Unix interfaces are buried under layers of abstraction. We still use the shell, but it’s no longer the universal composition system it was meant to be. What if we changed that? What if the Unix shell took the best ideas from docker, make, powershell and nix? Native support for primitives like containers, secrets and service endpoints ... Read full article.