4 ms·

One is always left with the impression Microsoft thinks their users are ignorant, for lack of a better word. Of course, along with all those users who Microsof

One is always left with the impression Microsoft thinks their users are ignorant, for lack of a better word. Of course, along with all those users who Microsoft treats as ignorant, again for lack of a better word, there are some very sharp people who use Windows -- who will perhaps take offense at any criticism of Microsoft -- no offence intended! (I am just not smart enough to feel confident with Windows myself -- too complicated.) What is amusing to me about this incident is that I imagine Microsoft would argue that "Monad/Powershell" is aimed at its so-called "power users". Apparently these "power users" would not notice or would need something like this? Intentionally or not, Microsoft is targeting beginners, not "power users" -- tactics like this leverage the popularity of the curl and wget programs and at the same time prevent beginners from learning how to use those programs, not to mention the long history behind them. Disclaimer: I prefer nc, socat and tnftp myself; I have no bias in favor of curl or wget.

JohnMH 10y ago
Yeah, there were a lot of "power users" working around these aliases. I mean a lot. That's something that was discussed on that pull request, in fact. People definitely noticed.
UK-AL 10y ago
What are you talking about? Most powershell users who aren't idiots, now that they aren't the real versions of the commands. They're simply there help people who might know bits of bash.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  curl and wget have nothing to do with bash
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    But they are commonly used in bash.
    - lottin 10y ago
      They're commonly used on Unix. Unix has many shells besides bash.
    - umanwizard 10y ago
      "They're commonly started from bash" might be a better way of putting it. When you're running curl, you're not running bash; bash is suspended. But the program you use to start another program isn't really relevant here. Sorry for nitpicking... people describing everything related to the UNIX command line as "bash" is a pet peeve of mine.
Delmania 10y ago
> One is always left with the impression Microsoft thinks their users are ignorant, for lack of a better word. My impression is that these aliases were added so people wouldn't need to install cURL and wget on multiple machines. > What is amusing to me about this incident is that I imagine Microsoft would argue that "Monad/Powershell" is aimed at its so-called "power users". Apparently these "power users" would not notice or would need something like this? PowerShell was initially aimed at providing sysadmins a better tool for scripting tasks within Windows. They added aliases to help reduce the mental shift when changing technologies. > Even if this can be explained away as a purely innocent "mistake", it still says something about the level of attention to detail. At the time, it was intentional. The reality is when PowerShell was designed, there were no plans to free it and put it online, it was a pure Windows tool. The decision to add aliases made sense.
- micro_softy 10y ago
  Yes or no question: Is it deemed too difficult for a user to create their own aliases, based on their own needs? Why should anyone have to make a "mental shift"? The answer is not because UNIX is incompatible with other systems. The answer is more likely because Microsoft Windows is a proprietary commercial product; its sales and marketing staff have traditonally sought to discredit UNIX. Having followed Windows from 3.11 onwards I would argue that it is "different" and incompatible by design. The "mental shift" is intentional and strategic, but not at all necessary. Why were there no plans to make PowerShell free and open source and publicly available initially? That's a rhetorical question of sorts. UNIX as the OS that generally "runs the internet" has become better known and more popular in recent years as a result of several factors. That's why MS has to make the moves they're making. keywords: "has to"
  - Delmania 10y ago
    >Yes or no question: Is it deemed too difficult for a user to create their own aliases, based on their own needs? Are you intentionally trying to be difficult? The answer is of course not, considering there is the New-CmdLet alias. These aliases exist purely as convenience factor. > Why should anyone have to make that "mental shift"? The answer is not because UNIX is incompatible with other systems. The answer is because Microsoft Windows is a proprietary commercial product and its sales and marketing staff have always sought to discredit UNIX. Having followed Windows from its inception I would argue that it is "different" by design. The "mental shift" is intentional, but not at all necessary. You followed Window's inception, and this is the best argument you can come up with? A not to subtle attempt to discredit the company? Your answer ignores the fact that Windows was built on top of a DOS derivative and the scripting language for Windows for many years was batch. It was different because it wasn't based on UNIX at the time because Linux was still in development. >Why were there no plans to make it free and open source and publicly available initially? That's a rhetorical question of sorts. I'd imagine because it was aimed at people who were managing Windows servers. Considering Linux has a robust set of tools to do that, there would have been no reason to do that. >As I see it, UNIX as the OS that generally "runs the internet" has become better known and more popular in recent years as a result of several factors. That's why MS has to make the moves they're making. keywords: "has to" I don't think anyone on this thread would deny that. The question is how is that remotely relevant? Companies have to change strategies in order to respond to the markets they operate in. Companies survive on profits and revenue. It makes sense their actions would be guided by those. Why is this a difficult concept for people to understand?
NetStrikeForce 10y ago
This is how it went for me: One day I typed "curl" in a PS window and I got this Invoke-WebRequest thingy. I toyed with it and decided I preferred to actually download curl for my initial purpose. Now I know Invoke-WebRequest exists and I like it, so now I have two different tools to accomplish similar things. And don't get me wrong, I actually agree that this use of the aliases is wrong and should be changed. We now have two options here, wait for MS to do it or fork the project. After all, it's open source.
- micro_softy 10y ago
  Great comment.

JohnMH 10y ago

Yeah, there were a lot of "power users" working around these aliases. I mean a lot. That's something that was discussed on that pull request, in fact. People definitely noticed.

UK-AL 10y ago

What are you talking about? Most powershell users who aren't idiots, now that they aren't the real versions of the commands. They're simply there help people who might know bits of bash.

umanwizard 10y ago
curl and wget have nothing to do with bash
- UK-AL 10y ago
  But they are commonly used in bash.
  - lottin 10y ago
    They're commonly used on Unix. Unix has many shells besides bash.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    "They're commonly started from bash" might be a better way of putting it. When you're running curl, you're not running bash; bash is suspended. But the program you use to start another program isn't really relevant here. Sorry for nitpicking... people describing everything related to the UNIX command line as "bash" is a pet peeve of mine.

Delmania 10y ago

> One is always left with the impression Microsoft thinks their users are ignorant, for lack of a better word. My impression is that these aliases were added so people wouldn't need to install cURL and wget on multiple machines. > What is amusing to me about this incident is that I imagine Microsoft would argue that "Monad/Powershell" is aimed at its so-called "power users". Apparently these "power users" would not notice or would need something like this? PowerShell was initially aimed at providing sysadmins a better tool for scripting tasks within Windows. They added aliases to help reduce the mental shift when changing technologies. > Even if this can be explained away as a purely innocent "mistake", it still says something about the level of attention to detail. At the time, it was intentional. The reality is when PowerShell was designed, there were no plans to free it and put it online, it was a pure Windows tool. The decision to add aliases made sense.

micro_softy 10y ago
Yes or no question: Is it deemed too difficult for a user to create their own aliases, based on their own needs? Why should anyone have to make a "mental shift"? The answer is not because UNIX is incompatible with other systems. The answer is more likely because Microsoft Windows is a proprietary commercial product; its sales and marketing staff have traditonally sought to discredit UNIX. Having followed Windows from 3.11 onwards I would argue that it is "different" and incompatible by design. The "mental shift" is intentional and strategic, but not at all necessary. Why were there no plans to make PowerShell free and open source and publicly available initially? That's a rhetorical question of sorts. UNIX as the OS that generally "runs the internet" has become better known and more popular in recent years as a result of several factors. That's why MS has to make the moves they're making. keywords: "has to"
- Delmania 10y ago
  >Yes or no question: Is it deemed too difficult for a user to create their own aliases, based on their own needs? Are you intentionally trying to be difficult? The answer is of course not, considering there is the New-CmdLet alias. These aliases exist purely as convenience factor. > Why should anyone have to make that "mental shift"? The answer is not because UNIX is incompatible with other systems. The answer is because Microsoft Windows is a proprietary commercial product and its sales and marketing staff have always sought to discredit UNIX. Having followed Windows from its inception I would argue that it is "different" by design. The "mental shift" is intentional, but not at all necessary. You followed Window's inception, and this is the best argument you can come up with? A not to subtle attempt to discredit the company? Your answer ignores the fact that Windows was built on top of a DOS derivative and the scripting language for Windows for many years was batch. It was different because it wasn't based on UNIX at the time because Linux was still in development. >Why were there no plans to make it free and open source and publicly available initially? That's a rhetorical question of sorts. I'd imagine because it was aimed at people who were managing Windows servers. Considering Linux has a robust set of tools to do that, there would have been no reason to do that. >As I see it, UNIX as the OS that generally "runs the internet" has become better known and more popular in recent years as a result of several factors. That's why MS has to make the moves they're making. keywords: "has to" I don't think anyone on this thread would deny that. The question is how is that remotely relevant? Companies have to change strategies in order to respond to the markets they operate in. Companies survive on profits and revenue. It makes sense their actions would be guided by those. Why is this a difficult concept for people to understand?

NetStrikeForce 10y ago

This is how it went for me: One day I typed "curl" in a PS window and I got this Invoke-WebRequest thingy. I toyed with it and decided I preferred to actually download curl for my initial purpose. Now I know Invoke-WebRequest exists and I like it, so now I have two different tools to accomplish similar things. And don't get me wrong, I actually agree that this use of the aliases is wrong and should be changed. We now have two options here, wait for MS to do it or fork the project. After all, it's open source.

micro_softy 10y ago
Great comment.