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PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

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Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#101
post #71

Powershell is an old tech, so browsing the source tree on github should show some of MS internal practices & guidelines in the old times. Yet the github project start in feb 2015. Where is the source code before that ?

On some interal MS RCS.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#102
post #70
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only they resolve the privacy leakage concerns in a reasonable manner.

In the Windows 10 thread someone posted this hilarious comic: http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/ We just have to hope that "our" guys (OSSers) have bigger guns than "those" guys (privacy destroyers).

Considering most OSS devs slam analytics on literally every website. Really there isn't much difference.

That's what windows is sending. Analytics information. Yet I can guarantee every major website developed by open source using devs is sending the same information for their apps. Yet no one complains.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#103

Wow. I've been very impressed with Microsoft lately. They could have easily set themselves up as the next IBM, in the sense of being a monolithic corporation relying on corporate practices, but they've been spewing some crazy fun things that shows they're not out of the league yet. Might just be MY miscontrued perception that microsoft was becoming old/monolithic, but really excited with the direction they are headin…

I agree with you! Even if this is all for microsoft's bottom-line (and there's nothing wrong with that since they are a business after all), we all (devs and consumers alike, directly or indirectly) stand to benefit. The prospects certainly seem exciting.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#105
post #102
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Windows 10 thread someone posted this hilarious comic: http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/ We just have to hope that "our" guys (OSSers) have bigger guns than "those" guys (privacy destroyers).

Considering most OSS devs slam analytics on literally every website. Really there isn't much difference. That's what windows is sending. Analytics information. Yet I can guarantee every major website developed by open source using devs is sending the same information for their apps. Yet no one complains.

Look at the comic. I'm talking about divisions inside Microsoft. I doubt it very much that Scott Hanselman (for example), who is in the camp that pushes Microsoft to open up, is the kind of person that designed the privacy controls (or their lack) in Windows 10.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#106

Wow. I've been very impressed with Microsoft lately. They could have easily set themselves up as the next IBM, in the sense of being a monolithic corporation relying on corporate practices, but they've been spewing some crazy fun things that shows they're not out of the league yet. Might just be MY miscontrued perception that microsoft was becoming old/monolithic, but really excited with the direction they are headin…

I speak only for myself. Microsoft have been hugely focused on hiring people who have experience outside the Windows bubble, and have been encouraging cross-pollination of ideas with the OSS world. There are holdouts for the old guard of course (there's still a BU that requires Windows Phones), but I think everyone knows that the Microsoft of old cannot compete today by bringing an attitude that pleasing the CFO is a…

If only their recruiters were a little more responsive...

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#107
post #32

PowerShell is my guilty pleasure of the computing world. Once you've piped strongly-typed objects around between your shell commands, text scraping seems barbaric by comparison. The problem, of course, is that you can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it is for Unix shells. I'm really hoping this will help spur a new wave of PowerShell-compatible…

Is this really so useful in practice? I have never used PowerShell before (nor do I have plans to do so in the near future), but I would imagine the downside is complexity, both for user and especially for developers. With text you just read and parse, while with objects you need to know the object type, its fields,... Whatever happend, I hope text stays here (and I have a bad feeling about it ever since I met system…

I find it massively useful in practice, even for mundane tasks.

For example, the other day I was trying to search the columns of a very large SQL Server table¹ but also needed information about the column type.

  …\dbo.site> ls Columns | select Name, DataType, {$_.Properties['Length'].Value} | where {$_.Name -like '*int*'}

  Name            DataType $_.Properties['Length'].Value
  ----            -------- -----------------------------
  internal_end    datetime                             8
  internal_start  datetime                             8
  interval_code   varchar                              5
  prod_intv_start int                                  4
  prod_intv_stop  int                                  4
  working_int     decimal                              5
Quick, easy. In a *nix shell that would be very tricky.

¹ SQL Server installs a Powershell extension so that you can essentially treat databases like a fancy object filesystem. It's wicked cool actually.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#108
post #32

PowerShell is my guilty pleasure of the computing world. Once you've piped strongly-typed objects around between your shell commands, text scraping seems barbaric by comparison. The problem, of course, is that you can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it is for Unix shells. I'm really hoping this will help spur a new wave of PowerShell-compatible…

Is this really so useful in practice? I have never used PowerShell before (nor do I have plans to do so in the near future), but I would imagine the downside is complexity, both for user and especially for developers. With text you just read and parse, while with objects you need to know the object type, its fields,... Whatever happend, I hope text stays here (and I have a bad feeling about it ever since I met system…

I've done some Powershell work in my brief time as a Windows sys-admin. I personally struggled with it. The object interaction can be complex and the naming feels less scriptable and more directly out of the C# world.

That being said, I can see the appeal and I know people who love it. I have seen some amazing shit written in it, like this security tool that was just open sourced this year:

https://github.com/adaptivethreat/bloodhound

I have used Mono/GTK# for years on Linux and prefer it over other GTK wrappers. Powershell might be worth a try on Linux, but it will take time to build up the libraries and wrapper needed to interface with most of the Linux subsystems (unless Microsoft as ported a lot of useful stuff in this initial release).

People don't (or shouldn't) use bash/zsh/fish for really complicated stuff anyway. I have a feeling most sys admins/devops people will continue to use Python/Ruby for complicated tasks; and they both have a ton of libraries that help avoid the stdin/out/parsing situation you have with chaining together regular shell scripts.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#109
post #54
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a full-time Linux user, I have to say that bash is overrated. For instance, on Windows I could press the up arrow through my history 20x to find a group of commands I want to run, press Enter, then press DOWN for the following command, then enter, then DOWN until I run them all. In Bash, I need to press UP 20x every single time. Yes, you can customize it a lot, and you can script it but default bash isn't that spe…

Bash is 27 years old. It was written to replace the Bourne shell, which is 39 . It is not terribly surprising that a 9 year old tool like Powershell made some improvements over an earlier tool that was already old enough to vote!

The bash I'm running is actually 3 years old. You make it sound like bash was written 27 ago and no one has touched it since then.

Secondly, what constitutes an improvement is a matter of opinion. For example, I don't see this Powersell as an improvement at all.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#110

I've been hoping for a fully-featured Linux version of Powershell for a while, very awesome. I've used various Linux distributions for a long time and find bash very practical usually, but when I started learning Powershell when working in Windows environments I've been impressed with how easy it was to do some powerful stuff, and felt conflicted since I wanted to be able to use similar functionality and scripts acro…

Powershell isn't competing with bash, it's competing with Python. So then, how does it compare against Python? While plenty of small scripts are still done with bash, I think Python is pretty common for serious production needs. I use it for virtually all scripting these days.

I had a recent experience where a developer spent a day and couldn't get Powershell's webrequest library to do what he wanted. I was able to accomplish the goal in 15 minutes with Python on a Debian system.

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