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Elvish and PowerShell shares one big thing: let command outputs carry structured value. Everything else is quite different: * Elvish is a more minimalist langu
by xiaq 6y ago
Elvish and PowerShell shares one big thing: let command outputs carry structured value. Everything else is quite different:
* Elvish is a more minimalist language influenced by the Lisp tradition, whereas PowerShell is a much larger language with its own distinct "flavor" (in a good way; the language has some quirks but seems decent overall).
* PowerShell has a lot of integration with the .NET ecosystem and Windows APIs. Elvish obviously has none of those.
* Elvish has a pretty sophisticated UI, whereas PowerShell seems to lag behind a bit in UI features.
Getting back to philosophy, it seems to me that the development PowerShell is largely driven by facilitating common Windows sysadmin tasks, and the team seems to have some very concrete use cases in mind.
On the other hand, the design of Elvish has two main tenets, one theoretical and one practical: make a good programming language that is still "shell like", and make a powerful flexible UI suitable for daily use.
- andreareina 6y ago> Elvish is a more minimalist language influenced by the Lisp tradition, whereas PowerShell is a much larger language with its own distinct "flavor" (in a good way; the language has some quirks but seems decent overall). Could you expand on what you mean by this? It sounds like you're conflating the size of the language with some measure of lispiness, but Common Lisp for example is huge.