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PowerShell is just so much nicer to use than anything where text munging is the only way to do things, and it’s just as “pluggable” as Unix shell commands. And

PowerShell is just so much nicer to use than anything where text munging is the only way to do things, and it’s just as “pluggable” as Unix shell commands. And it can output text (or JSON or XML or YAML) or whatever you want easily by piping into relevant commands (or just not piping anywhere if you wanted text). I don’t imagine those are going anywhere anytime soon but I think it is wrong to say the system cannot be improved upon.

diegocg 5y ago
I had to write a powershell script and my impression was that objects are a much worse interface than the worst text manipulation tricks. Because you are passing objects around it quickly becomes really hard to understand what is going on on the code and which object interfaces the script is using, because the object lives behind the pipe so to speak. It was my impression that it is too easy to create unreadable powershell scripts It also was unbearably slow in a modern computer, to the point that it made debugging difficult.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean. I would rather read Select { $_.Property } than some awk or sed stuff to fetch the same thing any day. I'm not sure how this is different than most other modern languages used to write scripts.
  - smaudet 5y ago
    While you can produce unreadable sphagetti in any language, powershell is just a poor mans Python without any real language features. I'd much rather use csharp(script) if I have a need to interface with some ms stuff (.net system libraries or whatever), powershell is just underwhelming and bloated without any real performance or productivity gains. Unix shells, for all their idiosynchronacies, tend to focus on small bits of functionality directly composed from common shell or system utilities. The complexities lie in outdated design, not in the language or form. We could definitely do with an upgrade to the underlying tooling, I don't find anything otherwise lacking in shell scripting otherwise. I don't agree with the OP that we need a web readable data format - perhaps the jq syntax could be useful but the best part of shell scripting is it is approachable by humans - if it is not you are doing too much and should be writing your missile control program in python or c, or similar. I dont think it should be easier to produce functioning junk nor should it be a requirement to master a data syntax in order to print a formated date. Maybe you need a different date program if you need to do something special.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Powershell is slow to start up. Do you have any benchmark to show that it actually runs slower than reparsing the same data thousands of times as text?
shatteredspace 5y ago
I would disagree and say that while PowerShell is well...powerful, it's not as pluggable as the Unix shell. Purely due to objects vs plaintext. PowerShell works off of .NET objects thus if I want to take output from one command and send it to another I have to verify that the receiving command can in fact receive the object type I'm sending. This is where the Unix shell to me is more 'pluggable' but it makes it more muddy as well. I can pipe plain-text information to any utility but to ensure that it will do what I want and not error out I may have to slice and dice my initial output a bit. Maybe to you pluggable means an output object from a utility being the same input object as another utility? In this case, Unix isn't pluggable at all.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  You can always transform the output by selecting particular properties, so the commands don’t have to expect exactly the shape of your first command’s output. This is similar to what you’d do in Unix to massage text output anyway.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Powershell is much more than that, you are only seeing the basic stuff. It is the only shell that ships by default on modern OSes that builds up on Xerox PARC ideas. It is not only .NET, rather anything on the OS. It also handles COM, DLLs, OLE Automation, WMI, pluggable filesystems. With Powershell you can easily automate something like use the currently selected cell on an Excel document, and use it as input for something else, including another active application. Something like that would be possible on UNIX shells with DBus like protocols, and ability to load shared objects into the shell, but on typical UNIX fashion everyone does their own thing and thus the whole experience remains fossilized.

diegocg 5y ago

I had to write a powershell script and my impression was that objects are a much worse interface than the worst text manipulation tricks. Because you are passing objects around it quickly becomes really hard to understand what is going on on the code and which object interfaces the script is using, because the object lives behind the pipe so to speak. It was my impression that it is too easy to create unreadable powershell scripts It also was unbearably slow in a modern computer, to the point that it made debugging difficult.

emodendroket 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean. I would rather read Select { $_.Property } than some awk or sed stuff to fetch the same thing any day. I'm not sure how this is different than most other modern languages used to write scripts.
- smaudet 5y ago
  While you can produce unreadable sphagetti in any language, powershell is just a poor mans Python without any real language features. I'd much rather use csharp(script) if I have a need to interface with some ms stuff (.net system libraries or whatever), powershell is just underwhelming and bloated without any real performance or productivity gains. Unix shells, for all their idiosynchronacies, tend to focus on small bits of functionality directly composed from common shell or system utilities. The complexities lie in outdated design, not in the language or form. We could definitely do with an upgrade to the underlying tooling, I don't find anything otherwise lacking in shell scripting otherwise. I don't agree with the OP that we need a web readable data format - perhaps the jq syntax could be useful but the best part of shell scripting is it is approachable by humans - if it is not you are doing too much and should be writing your missile control program in python or c, or similar. I dont think it should be easier to produce functioning junk nor should it be a requirement to master a data syntax in order to print a formated date. Maybe you need a different date program if you need to do something special.
kaba0 5y ago
Powershell is slow to start up. Do you have any benchmark to show that it actually runs slower than reparsing the same data thousands of times as text?

shatteredspace 5y ago

I would disagree and say that while PowerShell is well...powerful, it's not as pluggable as the Unix shell. Purely due to objects vs plaintext. PowerShell works off of .NET objects thus if I want to take output from one command and send it to another I have to verify that the receiving command can in fact receive the object type I'm sending. This is where the Unix shell to me is more 'pluggable' but it makes it more muddy as well. I can pipe plain-text information to any utility but to ensure that it will do what I want and not error out I may have to slice and dice my initial output a bit. Maybe to you pluggable means an output object from a utility being the same input object as another utility? In this case, Unix isn't pluggable at all.

emodendroket 5y ago
You can always transform the output by selecting particular properties, so the commands don’t have to expect exactly the shape of your first command’s output. This is similar to what you’d do in Unix to massage text output anyway.
pjmlp 5y ago
Powershell is much more than that, you are only seeing the basic stuff. It is the only shell that ships by default on modern OSes that builds up on Xerox PARC ideas. It is not only .NET, rather anything on the OS. It also handles COM, DLLs, OLE Automation, WMI, pluggable filesystems. With Powershell you can easily automate something like use the currently selected cell on an Excel document, and use it as input for something else, including another active application. Something like that would be possible on UNIX shells with DBus like protocols, and ability to load shared objects into the shell, but on typical UNIX fashion everyone does their own thing and thus the whole experience remains fossilized.