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I wonder whether "powershell" will go anywhere. For many I get the impression that command line means Unix. However Microsoft's ability to partner with hardwar

by acg 17y ago

I wonder whether "powershell" will go anywhere. For many I get the impression that command line means Unix. However Microsoft's ability to partner with hardware vendors could lead to a new way of seeing the command-line. Although I have my doubts.

silentbicycle 17y ago
Generally, "command line" means Unix because it refers to the whole ecosystem of pipelines and composable utilities such as grep and gzip. Unix provides support (spawning new processes is cheap, buffering stdin/stdout between a whole chain of programs is handled once at the OS level, etc.) that Windows programs are stuck without or forced to re-implement themselves in userland. Since Windows doesn't provide that kind of infrastructure, programs tend to become large and centralized, with one GUI interface and (maaaaybe) a secondary command-line interface, rather than a set of smaller utilities that interface primarily via the command line, and (sometimes) have a GUI frontend. While Windows could get a useful command line interface, the whole design of the OS works against it.
- acg 17y ago
  I think it is all too easy to be dismissive. Powershell could just be another VBScript, but it is clear that it is Microsoft's response to the proven usefulness of a decent command-line on OS X. Being Unix is not a prerequisite for the command-line being decent either. What makes a good command-line is consistency and power. For example the command-line on some cira 1980's lisp machines the command-line was the operating system. Then there is the command-line on OpenVMS. I think Microsoft intends to get round some of the limitations you list by building commands into the shell and making the shell itself extensible. Parts of it look very unix/perl like: http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk/archive/2005/02/24/379732.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk/archive/2005/02/24/379732.aspx Although I am skeptical, I'd welcome any move to make windows more usable and Microsoft has changed the game before in the past. Market share is not always given to the best technology.

by acg 17y ago

silentbicycle 17y ago

Generally, "command line" means Unix because it refers to the whole ecosystem of pipelines and composable utilities such as grep and gzip. Unix provides support (spawning new processes is cheap, buffering stdin/stdout between a whole chain of programs is handled once at the OS level, etc.) that Windows programs are stuck without or forced to re-implement themselves in userland. Since Windows doesn't provide that kind of infrastructure, programs tend to become large and centralized, with one GUI interface and (maaaaybe) a secondary command-line interface, rather than a set of smaller utilities that interface primarily via the command line, and (sometimes) have a GUI frontend. While Windows could get a useful command line interface, the whole design of the OS works against it.

acg 17y ago
I think it is all too easy to be dismissive. Powershell could just be another VBScript, but it is clear that it is Microsoft's response to the proven usefulness of a decent command-line on OS X. Being Unix is not a prerequisite for the command-line being decent either. What makes a good command-line is consistency and power. For example the command-line on some cira 1980's lisp machines the command-line was the operating system. Then there is the command-line on OpenVMS. I think Microsoft intends to get round some of the limitations you list by building commands into the shell and making the shell itself extensible. Parts of it look very unix/perl like: http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk/archive/2005/02/24/379732.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk/archive/2005/02/24/379732.aspx Although I am skeptical, I'd welcome any move to make windows more usable and Microsoft has changed the game before in the past. Market share is not always given to the best technology.