> What is the argument for shell scripts not working on typed objects? How much time has been lost, how many bugs have been created because every single interaction between shell scripts has to include its own parser. How many versions of " get file created timestamp from ls" do we need?

Aside: that's what the stat command is for. My big concern with types is how would you make sure that the output of a command will always have the right types? Otherwise you'll have runtime type errors which would be just as bad as runtime parsing errors.