I should turn this into a FAQ, but PowerShell is natural on Windows, where the OS provides objects (either via the .NET VM, or COM and .DLLs, etc.) A Unix shel

I should turn this into a FAQ, but PowerShell is natural on Windows, where the OS provides objects (either via the .NET VM, or COM and .DLLs, etc.) A Unix shell like bash or Oil is natural on Unix, where the OS uses text files. And in distributed systems where data is JSON, YAML, XML, protobuf, msgpack, etc. not objects. So basically shell is a "situated" language, and the easy of accomplishing any given task depends a lot on the environment. Windows is more tightly coupled and trying to provide something nice for you. Unix is messier but doesn't limit you, and it's what basically all big systems are made of these days. A major strength of shell is to glue things together that nobody thought should be glued together. --- Good example here from Paul Bucheit: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.html#productive-programmers-secretly-use-shell http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht... http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-... However, we needed a way for Gmail to make money, and Sanjeev Singh kept talking about using relevant ads, even though it was obviously a "bad idea". I remained skeptical, but thought that it might be a fun experiment, so I connected to that ads database (I assure you, random engineers can no longer do this!), copied out all of the ads+keywords, and did a little bit of sorting and filtering with some UNIX SHELL COMMANDS I then hacked up the "adult content" classifier that Matt Cutts and I had written for safe-search, linked that into the Gmail prototype, and then loaded the ads data into the classifier. My change to the classifier (which completely broke its original functionality, but this was a separate code branch) changed it from classifying pages as "adult", to classifying them according to which ad was most relevant. The resulting ad was then displayed in a little box on our Gmail prototype ui. The code was rather ugly and hackish, but more importantly, it only took a few hours to write! ---- Also, use whatever's best for you, but Unix people tend to hate PowerShell: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-woes-of-powershell-8737e5346b1 https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-woes-of-powershell-8737e5... PowerShell feels like it was built by people who had heard about command lines a long time ago and tried to recreate one based on stories passed down through generations of their ancestors The fact that they cargo-culted operators like -eq, -le, -lt, while not maintaining compatibility is just silly to me. In Oil it's "x == y" for string equality.