Patrick Logan's what if reminds me of something I heard a few years ago - what if Bill Gates' first language had been Lisp instead of BASIC? Melts the mind to think of what would have become of MS-DOS. The thing that's shameful about Windows is that MS is still trying to figure out a decent story for shell scripting. Monad sounds neat-o and all, but the whole thing about making programs output objects sounds maybe a little too clever. Then again, I've never really earned my bread doing Unix shell scripting, so maybe serialized objects do beat formatted text.