3 ms·
Isn't it ironic that Powershell from Microsoft is so much vastly superior than bash, not because it's great or even better than Python, but because bash is such
by DonHopkins 2y ago
Isn't it ironic that Powershell from Microsoft is so much vastly superior than bash, not because it's great or even better than Python, but because bash is such a terribly low bar to beat, that it totally undermines the "Unix Philosophy"?
Who would have thought that little old Microsoft, purveyors of MSDOS CMD.EXE, would have leapfrogged Unix and come out with something so important and fundamental as a shell that was superior to all of Unix's "standard" sh/csh/bash/whatever shells in so many ways, all of which historically used to be and ridiculously still are touted by Unix Supremacists as one of its greatest strengths?
You see, Microsoft is willing to look at the flaws in their own software, and the virtues of their competitors' software, then admit that they made mistakes, and their competitors did something right, and finally fix their own shit, unlike so many fanatical monolinguistic Unix evangelists.
They did the exact same thing to Java and JavaScript, leaving Visual Basic and CMD.EXE behind in the dustbin of history -- just like Unix should leave bash behind -- resulting in great cross platform languages like C# and TypeScript.
Edit: that reinforces my point that taking so long to get there is a hell of a lot better than taking MUCH LONGER to NOT get there.
Maybe bash's legacy inertia is a problem, not a virtue. Is certainly isn't getting a JSON parser in the foreseeable future. The ironic point is that even Microsoft's power shell has much less legacy inertia, and therefore is so much better, in such a shorter amount of time.
- crispyambulance 2y ago> Isn't it ironic that Powershell from Microsoft is so much vastly superior than bash I agree that powershell is now better than bash. But it took SO LONG to get there. Moreover, bash has had a 12 year head-start (ok, 30 if you count earlier unix shells). Bash has legacy inertia. Even though you can now supposedly run powershell in linux, I don't know anyone who does. Does anybody? That said, I think powershell is great for utility-knife uses on windows machines.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago> Even though you can now supposedly run powershell in linux, I don't know anyone who does. Does anybody? I do. I replaced all of the automation scripts on my rpi with pwsh scripts, and I'm not regretting it. Not having to deal with decades of cruft in argument parsing and string handling, learning little DSLs for every command, etc. is so worth it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kbolino 2y agoAt this point, all PowerShell has accomplished is creating a separate ecosystem. The designers set out to make a "better" shell and yet refused to ever learn the things they were allegedly "improving". Basic features are still lacking from PowerShell that have been in UNIX shells since the very beginning: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/3316 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/3316 But hey, that's a fixable problem, right? No, because PowerShell is so suffused with arrogance about its superiority that anything, no matter how simple it was to do in a UNIX shell, has to be cross-examined, re-imagined, and bent over the wheel of PowerShell's superiority, before ultimately getting ignored or rejected anyway. PowerShell is a language unto itself. It is not a replacement for bash/zsh/etc because nobody who knows the latter well can easily migrate to the former, and that's by design.
- g15jv2dp 2y agoSome very strong sentiments about a shell...
- kbolino 2y agoI want there to be something better than the UNIX shells, at least when it comes to error handling and data parsing. PowerShell was supposed to be that tool, but it seems to have lost sight of that goal somewhere along the way.