Tonight I took some time to to look at the monad video that Jon Udell posted. It's interesting to see how the Monad team has extended the notion of a shell to work in an object environment. While this isn't that new conceptually (you could do similar stuff in Python or Lisp), there are some very nice features, some of which fall out of the scale at which things are being implemented. The ability to have a shell pipeline terminate at Excel or some other GUI app could be really useful. This is the shell that you wish you had on the Mac that could talk to all scriptable applications. Writing pipelines that don't have to do all the text parsing that UNIX pipelines do is very attractive. It would be great to have something like this for Mono (I'm guessing that msh won't actually run on Mono).

This is the second video I watched today (I watched the Intentional Programming video earlier in the day), and I also watched the WWDC keynote earlier in the week. This is probably no big deal for most people, but I watch television (or see a movie) so infrequently, that I really don't think of video streams as a way to get information. In this case, it was compounded by the fact that I had to get off the Mac because the Mac version of Windows Media player couldn't play the IP stream, so I just stayed on to watch the Monad video. One other cool thing about the Monad video was that they had the transcript right next to it, so I could read the transcript where things were going slow, and rely on the "sync transcript" feature to keep scrolling the transcript to the right place to help me keep oriented.