> It's a huge minus. The fact that all shell tools produce text is a basic tenet of shell programming which underlies the composability and interoperability of

> It's a huge minus. The fact that all shell tools produce text is a basic tenet of shell programming which underlies the composability and interoperability of them all. PowerShell is essentially a cut down .NET environment with some nice syntax-sugar for typical shell activities. The objects in PowerShell are marshalled to/from text the same as in any other programming language. So you can still write your tools as normal. Any PowerShell specific objects would just be a wrapper, or extra metadata. If we're being honest we already have that for other shells to make them more convenient: autocompletions. PowerShell objects give you autocompletions, type information, and interoperability with .NET libraries _but for data in addition to commands_. The shell to programming language continuum has enough space to permit richer interpretations of the base data tools emit. We don't lose composability. > With something like PowerShell - you need a debugger, data viewers etc. Oh, what I would give for better shell script debugging. This is right up there with better CMake debugging for me.