Shell recipes

I've recently been doing a disproportionate amount of typing commands into Linux machines, and it got me thinking about the way that so much advice in the Linux community looks like "here, just copy paste these series of commands", or "download and run this arbitrary shell script". Heck, even the official NodeJS distribution has a just-run-this-shell-script.

But, at the same time, it's kind of hard to argue with results. You often do need to just run a lot of commands in a sequence and, well, that's what a shell script is for. Maybe the answer isn't to shy away from it, but dive in head-first and make a more sophisticated workflow around running arbitrary shell scripts. I'm thinking something a bit similar to IPython notebooks, where the text is interleaved with code and you can run the commands one at a time and verify their output. It'd be a kind of literate approach to shell.

Maybe you could even combine it with a transactional shell to confirm that each command did what you expect. It'd be strange to get to a place where shell scripts could be considered user-friendly, but I can't think of a good reason why not.