In the past, bash was gluing external commands together. Today we are mostly gluing APIs together. bash has stagnated and does not allow to work with APIs easily. Core functionality such as working with structured data is outsourced to external commands. This is not optimal and not convenient. NGS (Next Generation Shell) aims to be a language and a shell for today's systems engineers: structured data, sane error handling, and other features one might expect from a language that is being developed today and not decades ago. NGS is more specific than general purpose languages such as Python/Ruby/Go. That means syntax and semantics for common tasks such as running external programs.