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

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#641

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 8:50 AM 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 agree... though my default reach-for these days tends to be node. I don't much care for ps, even if it's now available on Linux, I just don't see myself using it much... I like C# a lot, and even other .Net languages. But I don't like all the extra typing for one-off scripts, even if they do get re-used.

I can paste various commands for other terminals/environments in a tweet, the same can't always be said for ps. It's just a lot of typing.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#642

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:03 AM UTC

artimaeis wrote: post #287

jimmaswell wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way was C#'s tooling not better?

Java seemed to have a lot more options for deployments and monitoring for a long time. More advanced 3rd party libraries in general. It had simply been around longer and thus had those tools available. Now that C# has been standard for a while almost all of those tools have a C# equivalent. As a .NET dev I'd actually argue that the things available to C# now are actually better (especially Visual Studio), but that's…

I'd have to agree, though I spend most of my time in the node space, today via VS Code (though I don't use the debugger at all). VS Proper with C# has felt better to work with than any Java tool/project I've ever used, though haven't done much with that ever. I jumped on the C# bandwagon in late 2001, early 2002 when it was still in development. Started moving over towards node around 5-6 years ago, and am currently looking for a reason to work with rust or go.

Most of my issues with C# have always, like Java, been about "Enterprise" frameworks, patters and practices implemented where they aren't needed, and complexity for complexity's sake. VS + C# is pretty damned nice, if you can work on a green project and not bring in everything under the sun.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#643

Post by akerro » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:05 AM UTC

larrik wrote: post #17

tombert wrote: post #9

I'm always in favor of things being open-sourced, but I do kind of wonder in what universe I would use PowerShell when Bash is readily available.

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…

I do that same on bash and zsh since... ever?

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#644

Post by d0mine » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:08 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #633

CrLf wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a number of years using PowerShell, my conclusion is the opposite: text "scraping" is just better for most cases. Normal shell usage means doing a lot of one-shot pipelines incrementally. This is just easier and faster to do when passing text around because you can look at it and not have to inspect some object for it's type and what attributes/methods it provides. Parsing the text is not the problem here (alth…

> Normal shell usage means doing a lot of one-shot pipelines incrementally. Sure because no-one ever takes those "one-shot" pipelines full of `cut`s and `grep`s and distributes them in real products. /s As far as I can tell, Powershell is designed for scripts that are meant to be distributed , so they must be robust. Normal 'text scraping' Bash is shit at that.

If we are not talking about interactive use then to distribute "robust" scripts, you could use nicer and richer Perl, Python eco-systems.

For interactive use, the conciseness, the human-readability of input/output and the fault-tolerance to unrelated changes in the input/output formats provided by Unix shells are also preferable.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#645

Post by bad_user » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:09 AM UTC

UK-AL wrote: post #404

bad_user wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, to make Visual Studio do IDE-like things, people install things like ReSharper, built by the same people that are building IntelliJ IDEA. And I worked with both and IntelliJ is much smarter, and has support for way more technologies. And yes, it's built in Java and can be sluggish, but then again I'm using it on both Linux and OS X and runs just fine on Windows too, so it doesn't tie me to an OS I don't want. Al…

http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/

No, FAKE is not a replacement for Maven. As I said, .NET is left behind in the Ant/Make era.

And since you mentioned an F# project, the absence of a Maven-like build, dependency management and deployment tool is why F#'s Javascript compilers are behind, because you have no shared infrastructure, no cross-compiled libraries, etc, because it's just too painful to do it.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#646

Post by krylon » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:14 AM UTC

Ind007 wrote: post #339

astrodust wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I find PowerShell to be an answer to a question nobody asked. If bash/zsh isn't cutting it for you, drop into something like Python, Ruby or Perl to do the heavy lifting. PowerShell will never accumulate a library as comprehensive as what any of those three have, each has had decades to accumulate packages of all kinds, and more are still being added. It's odd, but not surprising given their history of "N…

> If bash/zsh isn't cutting it for you, drop into something like Python, Ruby or Perl to do the heavy lifting. or Lua?

Hehe, I was so happy when I came across a Lua module for Windows administration. And so sad when I found out it was meant for Windows NT 4.0 administration. :(

A current reincarnation of such a module would be really sweet, though.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#647

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:20 AM UTC

haberman wrote: post #453

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…

> 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. Parsing command output with sed/awk/etc (ie. "common unix command line tools") is absolutely an ad hoc parser. Let me give you an example that I recently ran into. I have a tool that parses the output of "readelf -sW", which dumps symbols and their sizes. The output normally…

I've actually become a pretty big fan of line terminated json (all string linefeeds, etc are escaped). Each line is a separate JSON object... In this way, it's very easy to parse, handle your use case, and even pipe-through as JSON some more.

In this case, you can have objects as text, and still get plain text streaming with the ability to use just about any language you like for processing.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#648

Post by bad_user » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:21 AM UTC

rubber_duck wrote: post #420

bad_user wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, to make Visual Studio do IDE-like things, people install things like ReSharper, built by the same people that are building IntelliJ IDEA. And I worked with both and IntelliJ is much smarter, and has support for way more technologies. And yes, it's built in Java and can be sluggish, but then again I'm using it on both Linux and OS X and runs just fine on Windows too, so it doesn't tie me to an OS I don't want. Al…

>people install things like ReSharper This used to be true but VS2015 is actually completely fine without ReSharper. Roslyn is amazing, I've even built my own custom code analyzers (ie. compiler extensions) that integrate in to the entire ecosystem seamlessly (nuget package registers them to VS project, IDE shows you code analysis on the fly, C# compiler uses them on every build, including CI/build server - and you c…

FAKE and CAKE are not replacements for Maven, but for Ant/Make. Maven and Maven-like tools on the other hand are so much more.

Here's a personal anecdote. I work on Monix.io, which is a cross-compiled Scala library for the JVM and Javascript/Scala.js.

I could easily do that because of SBT, which is Scala's flavor of Maven. Basically Scala.js comes with SBT and Maven plugins. And you can easily configure your project, indicating which sources should be shared between the JVM and Scala.js and which sources are specific. And afterwards SBT takes care of compilation for multiple targets, building JAR files for both the JVM and Scala.js. And then you can also sign those packages and deploy them on Sonatype / Maven Central. The tests are also cross-compiled too and running whenever I do "sbt test", no tricks required or effort needed to do it. And this project has a lot of cross-compiled tests.

And if I were to work on a mixed JVM/Scala.js project, I could also include a whole assets pipeline in it, with the help of sbt-web, another SBT plugin. SBT and Maven have a lot of plugins available.

The Scala.js ecosystem relies on Maven / SBT for build and dependency management. There's no "npm install" for us, no Gulp vs Grunt cluster fucks, no artificial separation between "real Scala" and Scala.js, only what's required. And trust me, it's a much, much saner environment.

Compare with Fable. Compare with FunScript. Don't get me wrong, I think these projects are also brilliant. But it's because of the ecosystem that they'll never be popular, because the .NET ecosystem inhibits reusable F# cross-compiled libraries.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#649

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:27 AM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #563

dragonwriter wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately PowerShell relies on everything running on .NET (well, I think COM works, too); the idea of a shell that can expose live objects is useful, but PowerShell's platform limitations in reality doing that make it a far from ideal implementation of that concept. Something built on a protocol that is platform agnostic would be better.

Live objects don’t usually expose any protocols at all. They only expose an ABI. Do you know any platform-agnostic OO ABI, besides what’s in .NET? If you’ll wrap your objects into some platform-agnostic protocol like JSON, you gonna waste enormous amount of CPU time parsing/formatting those streams at the object’s boundaries.

You can run streams of many millions of JSON objects pretty much as fast as the IO can feed it... most of the time, in situations like this, you're constrained by IO speed, not CPU... assuming you are working with a stream that has flow control.

I tend to dump out data structures to line terminated JSON, and it works out really well for streams, can even gz almost transparently. Parse/stringify has never been the bottleneck... it's usually memory (to hold all the objects being processed, unless you block/pushback on the stream), or IO (the feed/source of said stream can't keep up).

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#650

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 9:35 AM UTC

cbHXBY1D wrote: post #463

z3t4 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lately i use nodejs and have replaced the cmd tools with node modules. It is more verbose then piping shell commands but easier to understand and the same script can be reused across platforms.

Really? I have to do this to execute docker commands and it is painful. A lot of child_process I/O and it gets hairy.

I find some of it's a lot easier with shelljs or mz, but ymmv. I also like that streams of line delimited JSON is really nice as well.