I read miguel's article on the future of UNIX.

You can pick pretty much any programming language and use it to invoke CORBA methods or implement a CORBA server. These are typically referred as "CORBA bindings".

In GNOME we use ORBit for our C bindings. Owen Taylor has written a CORBA implementation for Perl using ORBit, and bindings for Python and C++ also exist.

I hope they don't neglect bindings for the shell. I would really like to be able to type stuff into an xterm and use it to manipulate components.

I agree with his assertion that sharing functionality requires more than pipes and filters.

Also, a pipeline looks like this:

command | filter1 | filter2

Information flows from command to filter1 and finally to filter2. There is no way for filter2 to communicate with command or with filter1 and interact with it.

If we have two programs that can be made to work together using CORBA, how do we express the way we want to connect them together from the shell? Should we treat a running program as an object? How do we find out what interfaces it provides and how do we access them? Could we create a shell that parses the CORBA related stuff and acts on it and passes the rest onto the shell it was created in?

(The blockquotes are excerpts from miguel's article.)