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Powershell was truly a product of Microsoft monopolistic confidence. To create a language that allows absolutely no syntactical carryover from any other langaug

Powershell was truly a product of Microsoft monopolistic confidence. To create a language that allows absolutely no syntactical carryover from any other langauge is wild. You couldn't guess or assume any command, parameter or flag. Even with Microsoft's ambition they should have realized that legions of admins and programmers had to learn and maintain scripts in both Powershell and bash for a few decades at least. The extreme verbosity of the syntax may look good for a presentation to the committee, but dealing with it regularly collides with well-researched and understood limits of the human brain, where information of a certain size, and delays of a certain length break the state of flow and requires concentration, explicit memorization and double-takes. Even with practice one could never quickly execute the common shell incantation to turn a thought into reality, instead one would have to wrestle with syntax, even if it's just waiting for autocomplete to appear and deciding to accept the next word of a multipart command. Let's try the start menu and search for "pow..", chose between 4 amazing options, Powershell or Powershell ISE, both in regular and x86 flavour. Either would take a while to load, breaking flow. The ISE shows a little splash screen that jumps to a second location. Another dialog shows up and informs you that you've closed the last session without saving the unnamed script files. But it opens them anyway, as you would expect. So why scold me for this? Because, you know damn well that saving the textfile is trouble: I can type or copy, and then execute any kind of evil code imaginable, but saving the file and then running it as a .ps Script triggers the ridiculous execution-policy song and dance. Probably trauma from Microsoft's bad security reputation of early Internet Explorers and Windows versions. I tried to love it anyway but one day my script encountered filenames with square brackets. Powershell implicitly interpreted those [1] and [2] as iterators somehow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21008180/copy-file-with-square-brackets-in-the-filename-and-use-wildcard https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21008180/copy-file-with-...). Sorry but dealing with files is the one job a scripting language has, filenames are beyond the control of script authors, and the space of valid filenames on Windows should be known. This gave me some long lasting trust issues with that language. (The Azure team aparently had enough power within Microsoft to create their own, sane and readable syntax: "az find vm", "az account show".)

oblio 2y ago
> Powershell was truly a product of Microsoft monopolistic confidence. To create a language that allows absolutely no syntactical carryover from any other langauge is wild. You couldn't guess or assume any command, parameter or flag. Even with Microsoft's ambition they should have realized that legions of admins and programmers had to learn and maintain scripts in both Powershell and bash for a few decades at least. Um... no. Powershell was inspired by shell, Perl and a bunch of other languages, you see it in its design. The other part was just a desire for consistency, since *NIX knowledge is just brute forced. Yeah, -v is generally verbose and -h is generally help, but in practice you can't rely on anything.
- UweSchmidt 2y ago
  Could you illustrate how any other language inspired Powershell in any way, beyond the most basic concept that it is a scripting language? In bash/unix, I feel -l often stands for list, -a for all, -f for force, -q quiet or slient, -r recursive, -d debug. A modern approach could have been for Microsoft to clean it up and make it more consistent. But no.
  - thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
    >> Could you illustrate how any other language inspired Powershell in any way, beyond the most basic concept that it is a scripting language? I just posted this elsewhere in the comments, but it does answer your question: They originally based Powershell loosely on Perl and the Korn shell. In the first edition of "Powershell in Action" by Bruce Payette there is a sidenote that states: 'PowerShell uses the "at" symbol ("@") in a few places, has $_ as a default variable, and uses "&" as the function call operator. These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl. In fact, at one point, we were using Perl as a root language, and these elements stem from the period. Later on, the syntax was changed to align more with C#, but we kept these elements because they worked well. In Perl terminology, they contributed significantly to the "whipupitude quotient" of the language.' It also states: 'The core PowerShell language is based on the POSIX 1003.2 grammar for the Korn shell. Originally, Perl idioms were appropriated for some of the more advanced concepts such as hash tables. However, as the project progressed, it became clear that aligning PowerShell syntax with C# was more appropriate.'

oblio 2y ago

> Powershell was truly a product of Microsoft monopolistic confidence. To create a language that allows absolutely no syntactical carryover from any other langauge is wild. You couldn't guess or assume any command, parameter or flag. Even with Microsoft's ambition they should have realized that legions of admins and programmers had to learn and maintain scripts in both Powershell and bash for a few decades at least. Um... no. Powershell was inspired by shell, Perl and a bunch of other languages, you see it in its design. The other part was just a desire for consistency, since *NIX knowledge is just brute forced. Yeah, -v is generally verbose and -h is generally help, but in practice you can't rely on anything.

UweSchmidt 2y ago
Could you illustrate how any other language inspired Powershell in any way, beyond the most basic concept that it is a scripting language? In bash/unix, I feel -l often stands for list, -a for all, -f for force, -q quiet or slient, -r recursive, -d debug. A modern approach could have been for Microsoft to clean it up and make it more consistent. But no.
- thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
  >> Could you illustrate how any other language inspired Powershell in any way, beyond the most basic concept that it is a scripting language? I just posted this elsewhere in the comments, but it does answer your question: They originally based Powershell loosely on Perl and the Korn shell. In the first edition of "Powershell in Action" by Bruce Payette there is a sidenote that states: 'PowerShell uses the "at" symbol ("@") in a few places, has $_ as a default variable, and uses "&" as the function call operator. These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl. In fact, at one point, we were using Perl as a root language, and these elements stem from the period. Later on, the syntax was changed to align more with C#, but we kept these elements because they worked well. In Perl terminology, they contributed significantly to the "whipupitude quotient" of the language.' It also states: 'The core PowerShell language is based on the POSIX 1003.2 grammar for the Korn shell. Originally, Perl idioms were appropriated for some of the more advanced concepts such as hash tables. However, as the project progressed, it became clear that aligning PowerShell syntax with C# was more appropriate.'