Finally, a command line shell for the 90s fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for OS X, Linux, and the rest of the family. Autosuggestions Autosuggestion Thumbnail fish suggests commands as you type based on history and completions, just like a web browser. Watch out, Netscape Navigator 4.0! Glorious VGA Color Colors Thumbnail fish natively supports term256, the state of the art in terminal technology. You'll have an astonishing 256 colors available for use! Sane Scripting Scripting Thumbnail fish is fully scriptable, and its syntax is simple, clean, and consistent.
this style of programming was very common in UNIX's hayday. Instead of programs being dominated by a single language like Perl or Ruby, you'd build pipelines that combined standard utilities (like sort shown above), sprinkle in bits and pieces of AWK as needed, and drop down to C when performance was critical.