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> So while I am not particularly fond of Microsoft, powershell is better than bash (though frankly, what isn’t?) in every conceivable way. There are fair criti

> So while I am not particularly fond of Microsoft, powershell is better than bash (though frankly, what isn’t?) in every conceivable way. There are fair criticisms to be made of bash...but this isn’t a fair comment either; I use power shell a lot; I’ve written hundreds or thousands of lines of powershell glue for scripts and devops pipelines and all kinds of things. It’s not very good. It is one of those things that seems like it’s a great idea; everything is an object, don’t serialise between jobs, tab completion on related objects, verb-noun commands... it reads like a feature matrix. The reality is less ideal. It’s verbose, the commands are arcane, and the verb-noun thing breaks down into meaningless pairs in many cases, particularly in the azure commands, or worse sql server commands. Maybe, to be fair, there is a core of elegance in there, but powershell displays a fundamental failure: When an application doesn’t have to do the hard work of making a good cli, the resulting commands in powershell are actively user hostile. It’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over again; and things like the az-cli are a tangible acknowledgment from Microsoft itself that the results have been substandard, and rejected, overwhelming, by the broader community in favour of arguably inferior tools (eg bash). So... you might argue “network effect”, but I don’t buy it; powershell isn’t friendly; not to new developers, not to “clicks ops” developers, not to Unix developers. It’s firmly a middle ground “no one wants to use it if they can avoid it” product. Bash scripts, now there is literally a hell on earth... but bash itself? Works fine. /shrug

kaba0 5y ago
I didn’t mean that PS is the ideal shell, it has plenty of warts (I did mention the Verb-Noun thing), and bash’s syntax does have a good subset — namely piping, redirects to a certain degree. But variable substitution, not having proper math support, everything is text are terrible and they do come up with the arguably rare, more complex commands. Also, having a convention that has quite a few edge cases where it doesn’t work good may still be better than not having any. And the application not creating good cli is not shell-specific at all —- the linux world has it better because a good cli is prioritized. Even though git is often touted as having a terrible interface.
brushfoot 5y ago
> It’s firmly a middle ground “no one wants to use it if they can avoid it” product. No way, I love PowerShell. It was my first choice for the bulk of a B2B Windows integration product. Part of it's a C# desktop app; the rest is PowerShell scripts that customers can edit to taste. I reach for it all the time in projects. The pipeline is so clean to work with. Once you get used to how it handles collections, the cmdlets are very intuitive, and PowerShell Gallery has a large selection available for download. Objects instead of strings is big by itself, of course. Then you get the .NET standard library right in the shell to interact with them. Great for parsing dates, numbers; a powerful regex engine; stream manipulation; pathing functions; the ability to write and execute C# in the shell; etc. The cmdlets for data manipulation have gotten very good, too. The CSV cmdlets used to be unintuitive because they exported type data, but that's now off by default. `Import-Csv` and `Export-Csv` work with objects that you can easily manipulate with the set operations cmdlets. It feels very much like LINQ. Same with `Invoke-RestMethod` (`irm`) when interacting with APIs. It deserializes JSON into objects automatically. You can then easily filter or transform the result. There's a learning curve for sure, but once you get past that, it's a very good shell. I feel like it's one of the best things to come out of Microsoft.
unwind 5y ago
This comment would make it into awesome-space, for me at least, if it had some examples of the issues you mention.

kaba0 5y ago

I didn’t mean that PS is the ideal shell, it has plenty of warts (I did mention the Verb-Noun thing), and bash’s syntax does have a good subset — namely piping, redirects to a certain degree. But variable substitution, not having proper math support, everything is text are terrible and they do come up with the arguably rare, more complex commands. Also, having a convention that has quite a few edge cases where it doesn’t work good may still be better than not having any. And the application not creating good cli is not shell-specific at all —- the linux world has it better because a good cli is prioritized. Even though git is often touted as having a terrible interface.

brushfoot 5y ago

> It’s firmly a middle ground “no one wants to use it if they can avoid it” product. No way, I love PowerShell. It was my first choice for the bulk of a B2B Windows integration product. Part of it's a C# desktop app; the rest is PowerShell scripts that customers can edit to taste. I reach for it all the time in projects. The pipeline is so clean to work with. Once you get used to how it handles collections, the cmdlets are very intuitive, and PowerShell Gallery has a large selection available for download. Objects instead of strings is big by itself, of course. Then you get the .NET standard library right in the shell to interact with them. Great for parsing dates, numbers; a powerful regex engine; stream manipulation; pathing functions; the ability to write and execute C# in the shell; etc. The cmdlets for data manipulation have gotten very good, too. The CSV cmdlets used to be unintuitive because they exported type data, but that's now off by default. `Import-Csv` and `Export-Csv` work with objects that you can easily manipulate with the set operations cmdlets. It feels very much like LINQ. Same with `Invoke-RestMethod` (`irm`) when interacting with APIs. It deserializes JSON into objects automatically. You can then easily filter or transform the result. There's a learning curve for sure, but once you get past that, it's a very good shell. I feel like it's one of the best things to come out of Microsoft.

unwind 5y ago

This comment would make it into awesome-space, for me at least, if it had some examples of the issues you mention.