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First of all, all that is happening is the default is swapping. You can still swap back if you really must. Sure, but that's not really my point. No-one who is

First of all, all that is happening is the default is swapping. You can still swap back if you really must. Sure, but that's not really my point. No-one who is seeing the default swap had much if any say over whether the option to swap back would be provided, nor will many if any of those people have any say over whether and when the alternative will be deemed too much trouble to maintain and removed entirely. I remember painfully well my first experience with Powershell, back when it was new. I thought I'd give it a try, so I opened a shell window and tried a few commands. What happened next went something like the following. I'm actually reproducing this as I type this post, following roughly the same process using Powershell as installed on my Windows PC today, just to make sure I'm not talking complete rubbish here and it really is as bad as I remember... dir OK, great, I still get a directory listing. I'm in my home directory and lots of the useful subdirectories are hidden by default. No problem: dir /a What, why is that an error? Oh, this isn't really dir as I know it, and / is now a path separator, reversing two decades of Windows using \ for that purpose. OK, maybe it's more like bash then? dir --help No, that's an error as well. OK, let's try something else: help If you've ever tried that in Powershell, you'll be aware that it produces one of the most unhelpful help pages ever written. Even a simple section about what to read to learn about Powershell is full of jargon that no-one who didn't already know Powershell would necessarily understand. What is a cmdlet? Is that like a batch file? Where did all this stuff about properties and methods on objects come from? I'm trying to get a directory listing, not write a GUI in Java! At least it finally tells me the magic syntax to get help on any given command: -? dir -? Wait, what? I asked about dir, and it's telling me something about Get-ChildItem. Except it's not really, because all it tells me is some syntax for something I didn't ask about, with no indication of why it's relevant or what any of the options (I'm assuming) actually do. But after a screenful of more jargon I don't understand, it says something about how to get more information, so let's try that. Oh, I still can't copy and paste like most UIs had since the 1990s. OK, back to typing out tedious commands full of variations on what I actually want to ask about the old-fashioned way: get-help Get-ChildItem -detailed Oh, look! Several screens of further jargon, which apparently still don't support paging like any decent CLI since the 1990s either! But at least it tells me that what I want is the -Force option. Maybe. Because even the brief description of that option manages to use jargon I don't know and refer me to yet more help pages. And why on earth would an option that is normally used to override confirmation prompts when doing something destructive apply to a dir command? Somewhere around this point, if memory serves, I stopped, presumably fearing that I would lose the will to live if I carried on much longer. But again, I wasn't particularly trying to make the point here that Powershell is a textbook example of how not to do UI design, though it is and I might have been. My real point was that taking a tool that has been useful for 20 years and replacing it literally overnight and without prompting with a radically different tool that is also demonstrably inferior in some ways is a really, really dumb idea.

WorldMaker 10y ago
It's not changing overnight. It's changing in preview builds to get feedback from power users who asked for immediate changes as they happen. That change might eventually make its way into the Creator's Update several months from now and power users will definitely be forewarned by then. A learning curve does not make anything "demonstrably inferior" and a lot of the jargon you felt like outright ignoring can lead to rabbit holes where PowerShell really shines, if you let it. For the most part you've got a transcript equivalent to a DOS user switching to unix and having a hard time figuring out that dir is now ls and ls has a bunch of weird flags and hidden files start with dots for some weird reason... It's not really a demonstration of "inferiority" but a travelogue of ignorance. You complain about the help system of PowerShell, but when was the last time you even tried HELP.EXE for CMD help? If you want to talk about terrible documentation, there's a field day to be had in HELP.EXE. I remember trying to learn from DOS 5.x's HELP.EXE which was even worse back then. I'm sorry you don't feel like learning something new, but PowerShell is better than CMD if you give it a chance and maybe not glossing over so much of the jargon? «What is a cmdlet? Is that like a batch file?» For the most part yes, a cmdlet is like a batch file but more powerful. «Where did all this stuff about properties and methods on objects come from? I'm trying to get a directory listing, not write a GUI in Java!» That's where the magic in PowerShell lies, that's the rabbit hole to follow if you want to start seeing what makes PowerShell special.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  I'm sorry, but I think we're still talking at cross-purposes here. It is a fact that Microsoft can and do roll out significant changes to Windows 10 literally overnight and without giving many users the option to decline them. It is reasonable to assume from the fact that this discussion was relevant at all that Microsoft are at least considering doing that with this change, but even if they don't, the general point still stands. Whether or not Powershell is more powerful than the command prompt once learned is still not the point. The point is that it is different, and if this change goes ahead, something that worked yesterday in the same way as it had for literally decades will suddenly not work the same way tomorrow. As a final note, you seem to have confused my description of my initial experience with the then-new Powershell something like a decade ago with my current situation, but again, that really isn't the point anyway. The point is that forcing such a change on users could create at best a good deal of confusion and frustration among existing users who already know the current system they've been using for a long time. The comparison isn't between learning Powershell and learning cmd or bash, it's between learning Powershell and not having to do anything at all. The poor documentation and general clumsiness and verbosity of Powershell are merely rubbing salt in the wound at that point.

WorldMaker 10y ago

It's not changing overnight. It's changing in preview builds to get feedback from power users who asked for immediate changes as they happen. That change might eventually make its way into the Creator's Update several months from now and power users will definitely be forewarned by then. A learning curve does not make anything "demonstrably inferior" and a lot of the jargon you felt like outright ignoring can lead to rabbit holes where PowerShell really shines, if you let it. For the most part you've got a transcript equivalent to a DOS user switching to unix and having a hard time figuring out that dir is now ls and ls has a bunch of weird flags and hidden files start with dots for some weird reason... It's not really a demonstration of "inferiority" but a travelogue of ignorance. You complain about the help system of PowerShell, but when was the last time you even tried HELP.EXE for CMD help? If you want to talk about terrible documentation, there's a field day to be had in HELP.EXE. I remember trying to learn from DOS 5.x's HELP.EXE which was even worse back then. I'm sorry you don't feel like learning something new, but PowerShell is better than CMD if you give it a chance and maybe not glossing over so much of the jargon? «What is a cmdlet? Is that like a batch file?» For the most part yes, a cmdlet is like a batch file but more powerful. «Where did all this stuff about properties and methods on objects come from? I'm trying to get a directory listing, not write a GUI in Java!» That's where the magic in PowerShell lies, that's the rabbit hole to follow if you want to start seeing what makes PowerShell special.

Silhouette 10y ago
I'm sorry, but I think we're still talking at cross-purposes here. It is a fact that Microsoft can and do roll out significant changes to Windows 10 literally overnight and without giving many users the option to decline them. It is reasonable to assume from the fact that this discussion was relevant at all that Microsoft are at least considering doing that with this change, but even if they don't, the general point still stands. Whether or not Powershell is more powerful than the command prompt once learned is still not the point. The point is that it is different, and if this change goes ahead, something that worked yesterday in the same way as it had for literally decades will suddenly not work the same way tomorrow. As a final note, you seem to have confused my description of my initial experience with the then-new Powershell something like a decade ago with my current situation, but again, that really isn't the point anyway. The point is that forcing such a change on users could create at best a good deal of confusion and frustration among existing users who already know the current system they've been using for a long time. The comparison isn't between learning Powershell and learning cmd or bash, it's between learning Powershell and not having to do anything at all. The poor documentation and general clumsiness and verbosity of Powershell are merely rubbing salt in the wound at that point.