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Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

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Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#121

Post by CWuestefeld »

nojito wrote: post #34
cobbal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mac user, I was going to provide a flippant answer, but I decided to look into it instead. Personally, I use zsh or a custom built shell scripting library inside swift. Always like to see improvements to shells though. Googled for it and got a dozen guides on how to install it in mac, but none that actually explained how to use it. (One video result looked like it might have some info, but to me that doesn't cou…

You really don’t need any online documentation. Just use Get-Help and you’re off to the races.

This, in conjunction with the cmdlets and their parameters being something approximating English, with semi-standard verbs, makes things a lot more discoverable than Linux seems to me.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#122

Post by throwaway787544 »

andrew_ wrote: post #43

I'd like to know why Snower accepted abuse from corporate overlords for 5+ years (according to the thread). Being "in the dog house" for that long is ridiculous on the surface. That would never stand in today's world of tech. Is he just oldschool and had the mindset of "the company is always right"? Is he just a company man with intense loyalty? I would understand the company not adopting it and having to spend five…

It's because he was interested in philosophy (particularly Leibniz). He also left a job he liked just to develop PowerShell at MS. (he wrote an entire manifesto about it)

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#123

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

tptacek wrote: post #119
Wistar wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely true.

They had an actual formula for it, and I'm forgetting what the number was. Like 80% of some metric of other tech giant comp?

66th percentile of the industry for equivalent positions is what was reported.

Anybody who could get more than the 66th percentile elsewhere, more power to them. Anybody who thought that "66th percentile" meant they were being paid less than average, well, their departure was probably regarded as good attrition with a chuckle.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#124

Post by jrsj »

juki wrote: post #61
jrsj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not an aficionado) I feel like it is superior in many ways, but the syntax and case sensitivity have always been a barrier for me. It’s still worth it though when it’s the right tool. I don’t do Windows stuff often though so it’s always jarring coming back to it from bash.

> syntax and case sensitivity have always been a barrier for me Can you clarify that a little? PowerShell isn't case sensitive, and the syntax is just a mixture of traditional shell syntax (pipes, operators like -eq/-ne/-lt/-gt, etc.) and conventional C#-like syntax (if/elseif/else, switch, ?:, ??, try/catch/finally/throw, etc.).

There’s some gotchas with case sensitivity that I honestly can’t remember but I think it was related to some of the more C#-y bits.

As for syntax it really is the .NET elements & the relative verbosity of common things you’d interact with that just make it feel very foreign to me personally. This probably has more to do with Windows and .NET than PowerShell itself though.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#125

Post by polotics »

sidpatil wrote: post #33
polotics wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cygwin has been a reliable features-complete alternative IMHO

How is Cygwin comparable? That's like saying Wine can be compared to cmd.exe.

Cygwin brings me a compatible-enough layer on top of windows that I can reuse scripts. It is comparable as it gives me a CLI, and to hen as it is not infected by Microsoftisms it gives me a warm feeling of safety..

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#126

Post by oaiey »

sidpatil wrote: post #74
oaiey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of Powershell on Linux I think the story there could be different, however Powershell violates the core philosophy of Linux so hard (mit vs. GPL, pipe-and-filter vs loaded DLLs, ...) that Powershell will never be something integral and natural fitting there.

> mit vs. GPL By this measure, we shouldn't be using X or Wayland because they're MIT. > pipe-and-filter vs loaded DLLs At first I didn't understand what you were referring to, but I realized you were talking about cmdlets. In that regard, PowerShell is more like a scripting language than it is like a traditional Unix shell. The more "Unix-like" approach would be to write thin command-line wrappers around the librari…

Regards the licencing: you are right. I was a vit blinded by the core gnu tools.

Tiny wrappers do not work since .NET, while being very Performanz will never be C like tiny.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#127

Post by oaiey »

smackeyacky wrote: post #45
oaiey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bash as a shell is not so outstanding. It is the gnu tools and the other command line first Landscape. So bash on windows can never fly because these tools are not natively present (cygwin and friends are just awkward). So Powershell (and the new terminal) gives us this whole package with its build-in, service and windows provided commandlets. Consequently: bash will never beat PS on Windows except when someone provi…

WSL2 availability makes powershell redundant for most server oriented dev tasks.

Dev tasks. Yes. Admin tasks: not so much. The ask is not to create a windows client env to administer Linux machine. The ask is one management surface for Linux and Windows servers.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#129

Post by closeparen »

agent86 wrote: post #92

Question for the more seasoned Mac/Linux folks on HN: Powershell has been a gift in getting things accomplished in Windows. But one thing I've also come to enjoy using it for is quick and dirty interactions and scripting with REST APIs. Things like Invoke-WebRequest, ConvertTo-Json/ConvertFrom-Json, Export-CSV, piping between almost everything, and the results being passed around like an object that I can use SQL-ish…

This is the fundamental differentiation of Powershell, right? UNIX operates on text streams while Powershell operates on structured data. It is in a better position to do this kind of stuff.

That aside, a lot of contemporary cloudy CLIs will now speak json on stdin/out and JQ will make any json transformations you can imagine.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#130

Post by Macha »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #120
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to "learn" Powershell? My very limited experience has been: look up problem, find likely solution, enter 60-character command specific to this niche issue that I'll only ever have to use again in this exact situation, which is now solved until next reinstall. Having said that, those are the only situations in which I've needed to use powershell.

To be fair, as a native of Windows, you seem to be describing the process I need to go through for stuff like maintenance of my home Plex server (which runs on Linux). I'd even argue that, between PowerShell's kinda-guessable commands and parameter names (as contrasted to bash/linux) and ubiquitous --help, PS makes it easier (relatively) to discover a solution on your own. I guess a big part of this is what your nati…

> I'd even argue that, between PowerShell's kinda-guessable commands and parameter names (as contrasted to bash/linux) and ubiquitous --help, PS makes it easier (relatively) to discover a solution on your own.

Yeah, if I'm trying to find something out on Unix-y world I have the escalation tree of

1. Tab Completion shows summaries

2. Still not clear? --help will usually print out an overview

3. Really still not clear? "man" to the rescue.

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