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Powershell made 2 things gospel and I'm just sad it's going to take 20 years for other operating systems to realize that's the way to do it and something that r

Powershell made 2 things gospel and I'm just sad it's going to take 20 years for other operating systems to realize that's the way to do it and something that replaces linux to see it in practice (i.e. it just won't) 1. Auto-complete is by-design part of the language/shell 1. Pre-approved Verb list that prefix commands helps discoverability and usability no end. Still learning? Get-<anything> will literally never cause a problem. Because of the above get-help <function> can automatically create some fairly useful documentation right away and whoever wrote the code didn't need to do anything. They can significantly add to to help though. Because that mechanism is part of the language it's worth doing literally every user is going to access it, not some blog your wrote 5 years ago I hope is still online. Passing objects rather than string, whatever maybe it's not the best way, I think it's great. But That's not the only thing PS has to learn from. If anyone uses the cli and doesn't know how the PS help system works, it's certainly a breath of fresh air to learn.

agumonkey 8y ago
I never really found the verb list to be entirely satisfactory. It's great that they gave boundaries but I find it too verbose. There are other kinds of syntactic ergonomics with concise vocabulary (lisp has ! xxx p$ for instance, they're a bit harder to swallow but I find the code a bit more poetic and easier to remember as a pattern). About the objects vs strings, Kalman Reti (of Symbolics IIRC) talked [1] about how an OS passing pointers could enjoy a much easier time instead of serializing everything as strings then deserializing, especially when done ad-hoc through sed/grep/perl/whatever .. It pains me to see this. It pains me to see how linux basic utils are 30% --usage, 30% output formatting (and they all share this). MS did a great thing with PS. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk
- guhidalg 8y ago
  The verb list is, in practice, 90% Get-* and Set-* , so for most users that will cover the case where they need to read and modify some system state in a script. It may not cover your particular use case (I want to foo this bar), but as restriction on the language it helps your users not have to discover esoteric commands.
- felixfbecker 8y ago
  I like it. Nowadays CLIs got out of hand with verbs, every CLI assigns a very specific meaning to their verbs and it's not clear at all. Just look at kubectl: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubectl/kubectl-commands https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubectl/kubec... What is the difference between "get" and "describe"? It's totally not obvious what "drain", "cordon", "taint", "scale" or "expose" do. Something like Set-KubeReplicaCount describes way more accurately what scale actually does. Or New-KubeService for "expose". Remember that you can always use and create aliases, so you could still use kube-scale or kube-expose in the terminal if you want. But for scripts readability is the most important thing. Any newcomer can look at any PowerShell script and know what it does. And any newcomer could type in New-Kube, hit tab, and see what new things you can create in Kubernetes, instead of having to google what the command for creating a service is.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    You're right, these are completely obscure, and part of the friendly neologism fad we're seeing. Please note that the examples I showed about lisps aren't short sighted concepts but very generic ones (predicates, side effects, global variables), hence the limited scope of confusion here.
davemp 8y ago
I find PS tab complete to be sub par compared to fish. It’s too aggressive when there are multiple completions.
- felixfbecker 8y ago
  What do you mean by aggressive?
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    I don't know what they mean, but I know that I really dislike how PS's autocomplete works. If the possible commands are (for the sake of discussion) `Get-AppLockerFileInformation` and `Get-AppLockerPolicy`. If you type `Get-App` and hit Tab, it will autofill to `Get-AppLockerFileInformation` which I just really don't like, and I need to keep hitting tab to cycle through all other possible `Get-App*` commands. What I want is some UI that when I hit tab it autocompletes as much as possible until there's a decision to make, and then shows me the options. So in my example case, it would look something like this: Type `Get-App` -> hit tab -> shows `Get-AppLocker` -> type "P" -> hit tab -> `Get-AppLockerPolicy` is displayed bash-ish systems nail this, and they even have the "double tab" to list all options from that point which is normally pretty nice. The PS idea of "keep hitting tab or shift-tab while you cycle through all possible options" sucks in comparison. Especially with discoverability (There are about 20 commands on my windows system that start with "Get-App", and in order to figure them all out I just need to keep hitting tab until it cycles around)
    - lzybkr 8y ago
      With PSReadLine, you can change that: Set-PSReadLineOption -EditMode Emacs Or Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function Complete
      - Klathmon 8y ago
        The first one seems to change it how I want, but the second doesn't. And it doesn't stick around after closing the powershell prompt. And while I'm sure there's a way to make it persist, a shell's power is in it's ubiquity. If i have to change settings on every machine I work with, i'm probably going to want to use that time to install a different shell. I know that's an attitude that is pretty impossible for any new shell to solve for, but it's the truth. I'm not choosing the most powerful or "best" shell, i'm choosing the one that gets in my way the least. And for me, that's bash in 99% of cases. And until another comes along that really improves discoverability and makes it easy to learn and adjust to, i'm not going to switch. I have a ton of knowledge built up over the years about bash and I'm not in a position where I'd be able to dump it all and painfully try to learn everything new from scratch by reading manuals, trying out syntaxes, searching around for if what I want to do is possible, figuring out the "right" way to do things, and more. Even if it is better in the end, if I can't get over the initial hump, it's not very useful to me. Maybe this is just me getting old...

agumonkey 8y ago

I never really found the verb list to be entirely satisfactory. It's great that they gave boundaries but I find it too verbose. There are other kinds of syntactic ergonomics with concise vocabulary (lisp has ! xxx p$ for instance, they're a bit harder to swallow but I find the code a bit more poetic and easier to remember as a pattern). About the objects vs strings, Kalman Reti (of Symbolics IIRC) talked [1] about how an OS passing pointers could enjoy a much easier time instead of serializing everything as strings then deserializing, especially when done ad-hoc through sed/grep/perl/whatever .. It pains me to see this. It pains me to see how linux basic utils are 30% --usage, 30% output formatting (and they all share this). MS did a great thing with PS. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

guhidalg 8y ago
The verb list is, in practice, 90% Get-* and Set-* , so for most users that will cover the case where they need to read and modify some system state in a script. It may not cover your particular use case (I want to foo this bar), but as restriction on the language it helps your users not have to discover esoteric commands.
felixfbecker 8y ago
I like it. Nowadays CLIs got out of hand with verbs, every CLI assigns a very specific meaning to their verbs and it's not clear at all. Just look at kubectl: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubectl/kubectl-commands https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubectl/kubec... What is the difference between "get" and "describe"? It's totally not obvious what "drain", "cordon", "taint", "scale" or "expose" do. Something like Set-KubeReplicaCount describes way more accurately what scale actually does. Or New-KubeService for "expose". Remember that you can always use and create aliases, so you could still use kube-scale or kube-expose in the terminal if you want. But for scripts readability is the most important thing. Any newcomer can look at any PowerShell script and know what it does. And any newcomer could type in New-Kube, hit tab, and see what new things you can create in Kubernetes, instead of having to google what the command for creating a service is.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  You're right, these are completely obscure, and part of the friendly neologism fad we're seeing. Please note that the examples I showed about lisps aren't short sighted concepts but very generic ones (predicates, side effects, global variables), hence the limited scope of confusion here.

davemp 8y ago

I find PS tab complete to be sub par compared to fish. It’s too aggressive when there are multiple completions.

felixfbecker 8y ago
What do you mean by aggressive?
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I don't know what they mean, but I know that I really dislike how PS's autocomplete works. If the possible commands are (for the sake of discussion) `Get-AppLockerFileInformation` and `Get-AppLockerPolicy`. If you type `Get-App` and hit Tab, it will autofill to `Get-AppLockerFileInformation` which I just really don't like, and I need to keep hitting tab to cycle through all other possible `Get-App*` commands. What I want is some UI that when I hit tab it autocompletes as much as possible until there's a decision to make, and then shows me the options. So in my example case, it would look something like this: Type `Get-App` -> hit tab -> shows `Get-AppLocker` -> type "P" -> hit tab -> `Get-AppLockerPolicy` is displayed bash-ish systems nail this, and they even have the "double tab" to list all options from that point which is normally pretty nice. The PS idea of "keep hitting tab or shift-tab while you cycle through all possible options" sucks in comparison. Especially with discoverability (There are about 20 commands on my windows system that start with "Get-App", and in order to figure them all out I just need to keep hitting tab until it cycles around)
  - lzybkr 8y ago
    With PSReadLine, you can change that: Set-PSReadLineOption -EditMode Emacs Or Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function Complete
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      The first one seems to change it how I want, but the second doesn't. And it doesn't stick around after closing the powershell prompt. And while I'm sure there's a way to make it persist, a shell's power is in it's ubiquity. If i have to change settings on every machine I work with, i'm probably going to want to use that time to install a different shell. I know that's an attitude that is pretty impossible for any new shell to solve for, but it's the truth. I'm not choosing the most powerful or "best" shell, i'm choosing the one that gets in my way the least. And for me, that's bash in 99% of cases. And until another comes along that really improves discoverability and makes it easy to learn and adjust to, i'm not going to switch. I have a ton of knowledge built up over the years about bash and I'm not in a position where I'd be able to dump it all and painfully try to learn everything new from scratch by reading manuals, trying out syntaxes, searching around for if what I want to do is possible, figuring out the "right" way to do things, and more. Even if it is better in the end, if I can't get over the initial hump, it's not very useful to me. Maybe this is just me getting old...