PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#511

Post by Frondo » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:30 PM UTC

prewett wrote: post #482

I don't understand Microsoft any more. They are making all their proprietary lock-in stuff open source, and they are alienating their user base. I've heard a number of long-term Microsoft users express frustration the user experience (not to mention the Windows 10 upgrade shenanigans). It was bad enough that my dad, a long-time lover of Windows NT (he liked its VMS legacy) switched to a Mac and loves it. I feel like…

As a counterpoint, I've been a full-time Linux user (desktop and server) for well over 10 years, with server use for 20. (I'm 40, so while others have used Linux/unix longer than me, this is the entirety of my adult working life.)

With the open-sourced .NET stuff, I've been active in pushing for projects I touch to use it. And, I now dual-boot Windows 10 and Linux, actually using Windows for daily work for the first time in a decade.

Open source C#? Sign me up. And I really do like the Windows 10 interface. The telemetry stuff just doesn't bother me. I think it's largely a red herring.

(And, furthermore, I think privacy stuff really has to get nailed down in laws and society, not just with technology. Going just for a technical solution means you'll always be chasing the answer. Encoding it in laws, and setting people's societal expectations, means you get to set the answer instead of follow behind.)

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#512

Post by haberman » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #502

haberman wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking me why I use a tool instead of parsing a binary format manually? Does that really need explanation? If that is your attitude, why use any command-line tools ever? Why use "ls" when you can call readdir()? Why use "ps" when you can parse /proc? You just pointed me to Kernighan and Pike a second ago. I didn't expect I would need to justify why piping standard tools together is better than programming ever…

I never said anything about not liking command line tools. In fact I love them and think they do a awesome job! In any case you just proved my point. You think its insane to parse binary data while scripting and I do too. That is why I think the passing binary objects is insane on the shell. Now if you were talking about text base objects (not binary ones) then that is an entirely different story and I feel that is w…

This isn't about binary vs text, it is about structured vs. unstructured.

The legacy of UNIX is flat text. Yes it may be expressing some underlying structure, but you can't access that structure unless you write a parser. Writing that parser is error-prone and unnecessary cognitive burden.

PowerShell makes it so the structure of objects is automatically propagated between processes. This is undeniably an improvement.

I'm not saying PowerShell is perfect. From what I understand the objects are some kind of COM or .NET thing, which seems unnecessary to me. JSON or some other structured format would suffice. What matters is that it has structure.

I still don't think you appreciate how fragile your ad hoc parsers are. When things go wrong, you say you "feel" readelf has a bug. What if they disagree with you and they "feel" it is correct? There is no document that says what readelf output promises to do. You're writing parsers based on your expectations, but no one ever promised to meet your expectations. But if the data was in JSON, then there would be a promise that the data follows the JSON spec.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#513

Post by elchief » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:40 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #458

elchief wrote: post #395

`cat youCantBeWorseThanCmdRight.utf8.txt > openMeAfter.txt` in PowerShell and cmd, and tell me how good posh is now go tail a 1GB file in posh and bash and tell us your results

PowerShell defaults to UTF-16 encoding, indeed. It's a design choice on a system that uses UTF-16LE as its character encoding and one from the early 2000s. UTF-8 wasn't nearly as prevalent back then. However, the text in both files is still the same. Get-Content -Tail some1gbfile.txt works quite well, by the way.

well, enjoy typing

    Get-Content -Encoding utf8 .\utf8.txt | Out-File -Encoding utf8 out.txt

and manually removing the BOM, for the rest of your life

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#514

Post by Volt » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:40 PM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #93

Analemma_ wrote: post #6

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…

As a note, there have been strongly-typed shell languages for Unix for some time. Scheme Shell[0], Turtle[1] and TCSH[2] leap to mind; but there's nothing preventing a developer from using Perl, Python, Lisp or any other language that allows itself to accept stdin as an interpreted script. 0: https://scsh.net/ 1: http://www.haskellforall.com/2015/01/use-haskell-for-shell-s... 2: http://www.tcsh.org/Welcome Edit: oh m…

I've never seen tcsh referred to as strongly typed. Could you elaborate?

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#515

Post by coldtea » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

newacct23 wrote: post #441

coldtea wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Like all those early car buyers would be perfectly happy with faster horses.

false equivalency

No, actually it's quite apt.

PowerShell, or at least the concept behind PowerShel, is an improvement/superset over the Unix shells -- and can do whatever the shells can do, plus stuff they cannot do, because they don't support typed entities.

Its problems are not technical or conceptual -- they are ecosystem and historical: lack of compatible tools, windows-only, etc.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#516

Post by brazzledazzle » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:45 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #408

JeffreySnover wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not quite right. At the end of the day it is all about automation. But we took the position that the way Admins automate is by scripting the things that they do in an interactive shell. Bruce Payette had a great way of saying it - he said that the lifecycle of 99% of scripts starts at the prompt and ends at the carriage return. Then, somethings you want to codify things so you put it into a script. Then as th…

That is not quite right either. I enter about 200 commands on a normal workday and write maybe two scripts a month in a shell language. A shell language should be a shell language, it's not merely a stepping stone to write a script after using a command just once. If that's what I'm looking for I'll use Python. And from the other side, Python would be a terrible shell (by default), and that's fine because that's not…

You're correcting Jeffrey Snover about the point of Powershell. I suspect that the guy that invented it and championed it through years of resistance at Microsoft probably knows what is or isn't intended with Powershell.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#517

Post by fsloth » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:50 PM UTC

artursapek wrote: post #351

vmarsy wrote: post #79

Great! So I can now run bash on windows (with WSL), open tmux, and open powershell prompts in each tab: the loop is complete! I wish powershell's documentation was a bit more clear about what's powershell 1.0, 2.0, 3.0... Etc. A lot of time I'd find a verbose and tedious way to do one thing because the code was written in "old powershell", when the latest version had a much more elegant solution (either because of ne…

Does tmux work well on Windows? Everything Microsoft has been doing recently with bash on Windows has made me consider buying a surface pro as my next machine.

I have Surface Pro 4 i5 and while I personally love it- I can't really recommend it due to various issues (battery life is shit, sleep is bugridden so best to hibernate only). It's uncomfortable as a tablet, and near useless for the main thing ultra light computers are used - traveling a lot.

I use it at home. The pros are a really tiny size, yet it packs sufficient computing power for many things, awesome screen. I can use it at a desk or grab it to the sofa - but I need to keep the power adapter handy.

If the execution was as flawless as Apple's Ipads are it would probably be the best computer ever (by my subjective scoring which appreciates a pen and sRGB precise screen probably way more than the average user).

But as it is - and I'm comparing it to my Ipad pro which makes all the problems stick out like a sore thumb - it's not an obvious recommendation.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#518

Post by MaulingMonkey » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:50 PM UTC

madmax96 wrote: post #397

mbrumlow wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that to be the issue. You are considering it just RAW text when it is actually formatted text that has been parsable for years with common unix command line tools. It not being in the format you consider a structured object does not mean it's not a object or even parsable. If you are using ad hoc regex I suspect you are not using all the tools available to you. I feel like Kernighan and Pike do a much better j…

So much this. What the M$ community fails to see is that text streams can be consumed by __everyone__. We've basically all accepted the fact that programs are used longer and in different ways than we'd expect. A brittle object model can only lead to vendor lock in and indigestible output.

> What the M$ community fails to see is that text streams can be consumed by __everyone__.

Text can be poorly parsed by everyone, yes. I especially love it when the default tools settings mean two different computers will give different text results, because the installation defaults changed at some point. What's not to love about trying to properly escape and unescape strings via the command line, while simultaneously keeping in mind your own shell's escaping, and having scripts which are neither backwards nor forwards compatible? And this is to say nothing of different distros.

It's as if the text was built for humans instead of my tools half the time, or something. I usually try to centralize my parsing of text in one place so when it invariably breaks, I don't have to rewrite my entire shell script.

Some basic structuring - I hesitate to call it a brittle object model, when most of the time I'm dealing with something more akin to C structs than invariant and abstraction laden Smalltalk or somesuch, or Java's sprawl of factories and inheritance - makes things a bit easier. New fields can be added without breaking my regular expressions. I don't need to worry about escapes to handle special characters. I can trivially dump to text for display (by simply running the command as this is the default behavior of the shell), or to feed into text consuming tools.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#519

Post by vardump » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #467

vardump wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...things available to C# now are actually better (especially Visual Studio), but that's certainly biased. You call Visual Studio good? Have you actually used it? VS2015 is painfully slow, and yes, I've installed all of the updates and I have no plugins or such. Heck, even Eclipse feels zippy compared to it. Something as simple as finding next text search match takes about a second. Changing to a different source c…

"Something as simple as finding next text search match takes about a second." I'm not sure how our configurations differ but on a fairly modern machine (say, surface pro 4 i5) I've not had visual studio 2015 slow down, and editing and searching is az zippy as with Vim for me. I've had the experience that some third party tools have bogged down the experience, though.

I mostly run it on a Xeon workstation with 32 GB RAM, SSD, Nvidia K5000, etc. I think you can call it a modern machine. Other software runs fast.

I don't have any third party software installed on top of VS2015.

Only unusual aspect is that I also have several other Visual Studio versions installed, like VS2008, VS2010, VS2012 and VS2013.

I also have many Windows SDK and DDK (driver devkit) versions.

But that shouldn't affect, right?

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#520

Post by brazzledazzle » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

ksk wrote: post #379

lottin wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ip addr | awk '/inet / { print $2 }'

That doesn't work either. [kapil@localhost ~]$ ip addr | awk '/inet / { print $2 }' 127.0.0.1/8 192.168.128.236/24 [kapil@localhost ~]$ You guys are just proving my point. _I_ already know how to do it using bash. Its just that using objects and querying properties is far simpler . And I just took a random example because its a common thing that someone would want to do.

You really couldn't have asked for a better chain to demonstrate the validity of your point. Having been blinded by my own world view and biases in the past I sympathize with them but this is too funny not to have a little laugh at their expense.