In defense of PowerShell
benwilson.me
In defense of PowerShell
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#2"I think many of the misconceptions I see on HN about PowerShell (and much of the Windows hate in general, actually) are because the typical use case on HN is quite a bit different than that of an internal IT department of a non-tech company, which is more Microsoft’s focus."
This, and vice versa that you see in other online communities. Debating your religious position is almost becoming safer than stating your technology choices, which like religion are quite often not your choices to start with.
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#3The tab completion in powershell is frustrating to me. I never want to cycle through every available option (especially when many PSH commands have literally hundreds of switches). I want the tab-completion to only show options for which I've started typing the prefix. I want double-tab to print a listing of said options so that I can see them all at once. Is this possible? Right now it feels like there's a major lack of discoverability in PSH.
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#4Much of the time that PowerShell is mentioned here is in the context of a discussion about how nun-punchingly awful the Unix shell is, and what could possibly replace it. I have never used PowerShell, so I have nothing to add to those discussions, but the fish-out-of-water nature of much of the commentary about it, particularly the negative commentary, is because of this.
Sadly for those of us who detest the shell, nobody seems to have a good replacement at hand.
EDIT: superfluous "I" removed
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#5The tab completion in powershell is frustrating to me. I never want to cycle through every available option (especially when many PSH commands have literally hundreds of switches). I want the tab-completion to only show options for which I've started typing the prefix. I want double-tab to print a listing of said options so that I can see them all at once. Is this possible? Right now it feels like there's a major lac…
The usual PowerShell guru's response to your complaint is 'This is what PowerShell ISE is for'.
Personally I don't think this is elegant, but that's what I usually encounter in the wild.
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#6> I’m willing to admit that PowerShell isn’t obviously better as a shell than something like bash, but it’s unquestionably a better language to use for scripting.
There's a missing "on Windows" here. Sure, PowerShell is clearly a tool designed for the Windows environment. And if you're a Windows system administrator, it has more tools and glue for that environment. You could use PowerShell to replace things that you'd otherwise have to write in Python or similar, not shell.
But that doesn't make it "unquestionably a better language to use for scripting" overall; it makes it a better fit for its target platform, which is certainly true.
And an earlier part of the document made exactly that point: PowerShell on Linux would be as uncomfortable as Cygwin is on Windows. There's an impedance mismatch there.
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#7I work primarily in a Microsoft environment, although I have Linux shell experience as well, and I totally don't get Powershell. What is a cmdlet? Why does it need a stupid made-up name like that? Why are all the commands incredibly verbose and hard to remember? I avoid using it at every opportunity.
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#8It worse than that, the misunderstanding that is.
I live and breathe Linux. But Powershell is so far ahead of bash for text and object manipulation, it's not really even a close call.
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#9I work primarily in a Microsoft environment, although I have Linux shell experience as well, and I totally don't get Powershell. What is a cmdlet? Why does it need a stupid made-up name like that? Why are all the commands incredibly verbose and hard to remember? I avoid using it at every opportunity.
I find Powershell extremely weird. We have a fair number of Powershell scripts for admin tasks and frankly I think they'd all be easier to understand if they were just written in C#.
Re: In defense of PowerShell
#10Much of the time that PowerShell is mentioned here is in the context of a discussion about how nun-punchingly awful the Unix shell is, and what could possibly replace it. I have never used PowerShell, so I have nothing to add to those discussions, but the fish-out-of-water nature of much of the commentary about it, particularly the negative commentary, is because of this. Sadly for those of us who detest the shell, n…
Much of the time that PowerShell is mentioned here is in the context of a discussion about how nun-punchingly awful the Unix shell is, and what could possibly replace it.
Precisely my impression as well. It's the PowerShell promoters who tend to be the ones that bait first.
I'm personally not partial to PowerShell, but I hardly loathe it, either. I think the likes of the Inferno shell and es show the right path to what a modern shell should resemble.