4 ms·

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 passin

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 The complexities lie in outdated design, not in the language or form.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?

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?