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[Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.] As far as I recall, the original impetus behind what became PowerShell (as handed down to us in a conference room by Ballm
by xl 10y ago
[Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.]
As far as I recall, the original impetus behind what became PowerShell (as handed down to us in a conference room by Ballmer himself, sometime around 2001) was to fill the gap between ops people who did enterprise administration manually with tools like MMC and engineers who automated enterprise administration with tools like C++/DCOM. The latter were necessary in a lot of cases, but they were expensive, and we needed to give the industry a way to do powerful automation without hiring a bunch of PhDs. So, yes, someone did ask for it - the IT industry.
- itomato 10y agoNot "The IT Industry", surely only a subset of Windows systems managers.
- jaredhansen 10y agoThat's actually a pretty substantial chunk of "the IT Industry" though. And if you're the people who make Windows, it's not surprising that it's a big enough chunk to do something about.
- jl6 10y agoI personally find that the term "IT" has become a bit of a code word for "Enterprise Wintel", and that anyone working outside of the gravitational pull of Microsoft prefers to describe themselves as working in "tech"
- toomanybeersies 10y agoI think that IT has become a code word for being a tech worker in a company, rather than a worker in a tech company.
- robotresearcher 10y ago> So, yes, someone did ask for it - the IT industry. ... who couldn't use the well-known mature shell tools since they were locked into a closed platform, and Windows' cmd.exe was comparatively very weak.
- mattzito 10y agoWell, lots of windows admins used things like cygwin and the like to get a unix-y working environment, but PowerShell offers a much more robust set of mechanisms to manipulate the underlying Windows operating system.
- Someone1234 10y agoIt wasn't cmd that was the problem (although, it is weak); it was how Windows exposed APIs to allow automated solutions. You had two options: VBScript (which is a glorified COM+ agent) or a "real" programming language like VB6/C# which mixed COM+ with Win32 API calls (which are too hard to use for most non-programmers). Powershell within itself does improve CMD. But that isn't primarily how PS pushed Windows automation forward, Microsoft said that every major server feature and server function should work in Powershell, so engineers at Microsoft had to look at it (be it their lacking COM+ interface, provide a new PS interface, or something else). The net result isn't that CMD got replaced by something better. It is that we have a lot more APIs and ways of interacting with Windows features and services than we ever used to. The ironic thing is that today you could write MS Dos-style console applications that work in CMD which provide all of this new automation functionality because of the Powershell push. Back before Powershell you'd have to hack it using unsupported APIs, registry entries and similar.
- toyg 10y agoIf all this API effort had gone into a real cross-platform language (Python, Ruby, or even Perl which was king in 2001), Windows would have flourished. They went for their traditional lock-in approach instead, so now they have to catch up.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jjnoakes 10y agoWindows did flourish... And are you suggesting that Perl would have been a better solution for a Windows interactive shell and automation tool? Are you going for the more readable argument? Or the more strongly typed argument?
- alistproducer2 10y agoI read this a while back. It's an interview with the dude who wrote PS https://www.petri.com/jeffrey-snover-powershell https://www.petri.com/jeffrey-snover-powershell
- aurhum 10y agoHis HN handle is JeffreySnover; He is commenting on this story at this moment.
- rbanffy 10y ago> a way to do powerful automation without hiring a bunch of PhDs. I remember writing Windows software with DCOM was difficult, but it was more on the painfulness side than a difficult intellectual endeavor. Sure you didn't need PhDs to automate things. > So, yes, someone did ask for it - the IT industry. The part of it stuck in Windows, that is. Vendor lock-in is a powerful thing.
- bluejekyll 10y agoYeah, DCOM was a task of fillout the correct fields with the correct values, and try again until you get it right. Anyone with passing C++ knowledge could do it through shear brute force. It's one of the things which made me never want to program on Windows again.
- kazinator 10y agoI ported a bunch of COM to Linux in the late 1990's. Not DCOM with the full RPC, but just in-process COM. I had .so shared libs with DllMain and DllCanUnload now in them, I had CoCreateClass, I had a significant part of the registry API implemented in terms of a text file store (HKEY_LOCAL_USER being in the home directory, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE somewhere in /etc, ...) and such. IUnknown, QueryInterface, AddRef, Release, ...
- snaky 10y agoThat's nice, but having CORBA implementations - why?
- kazinator 10y agoTo port some code as-is.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agoNetscape did that with XPCOM [1] they once thought that this is a good idea - i guess for versioning of interfaces; nowadays firefox has moved on from this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM
- chetanahuja 10y agoAll those sysadmins would have been perfectly happy with just a properly working unix like shell.
- coldtea 10y agoYes. Like all those early car buyers would be perfectly happy with faster horses.
- newacct23 10y agofalse equivalency
- coldtea 10y agoNo, actually it's quite apt. PowerShell, or at least the concept behind PowerShel, is an improvement/superset over the Unix shells -- and can do whatever the shells can do, plus stuff they cannot do, because they don't support typed entities. Its problems are not technical or conceptual -- they are ecosystem and historical: lack of compatible tools, windows-only, etc.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoOr to the point of the original parent: the industry considers powershell a solution in search of a problem.
- pjmlp 10y agoOnly those that disregard the inventions from Xerox and ETHZ. Powershell ideas go back to how REPLs work in those environments.
- sigsergv 10y agoBoth PS and bash are horses actually.
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- scurvy 10y agoI was part of the Hotmail team which consisted mainly of Solaris admins trying to mass administer a giant number of Windows servers. We kept pleading with the Windows team and upper management (forgot who it was at the time, Raikes?) to give us a powerful shell and ssh on Windows. We ended up licensing FSecure's ssh daemon for windows. We also used cygwin, too.
- thoth 10y ago>forgot who it was at the time, Raikes? It was Allchin when I was there... about that era.