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Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

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Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#131

Post by sjellis »

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…

There are a few projects that take inspiration from PowerShell, but they haven't got mass adoption. I have hopes that Nushell will be a success when it gets to 1.0:

https://www.nushell.sh/

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#132

Post by sidpatil »

oaiey wrote: post #126
sidpatil wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

I meant tiny wrappers around non-.NET libraries, to approximate the functionality you get in PowerShell in a traditional UNIX shell.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#133

Post by jodrellblank »

einpoklum wrote: post #8
Arnavion wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Neither? It's a superior alternative to cmd.exe. bash has never been a serious contender for Windows. Before PS you always wrote .bat scripts for cmd.exe (or .vbs for cscript.exe if you were really depraved). Nobody except Linux-first FOSS authors would expect Windows users to have cygwin / msys / mingw32 installed. PS gave us a saner choice, though we would still usually bundle it with a .bat wrapper, just to a)…

But instead of coming up with PS, it would have been pretty straightforward to just install bash on Windows. Someone chose to go the PS way rather than the bash way. My question is what the reason was for making this choice. > Nobody except Linux-first FOSS authors Bourne shell and its predecessors and successors are traditional and common on most computer systems since the early 1970s (starting with the Thompson she…

J. Snover started out bringing Unix (VMS) shell to Windows, and it isn't a good fit. Everything isn't text and so the Unix shell tools are pretty limited. So they made something which is a good fit for Windows everything-is-an-API instead.

> "The question is, why go for PS instead of adopting a regular shell."

The question is, why stick with 1970s stuff when you can have progress?

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#134

Post by jodrellblank »

einpoklum wrote: post #3

Question for the PowerShell afficionados: Do you consider PowerShell to be "something we can count on to exist on Windows systems, in the absence of Bourne-like shells" - or is it "a superior alternative to Bourne shells which only got traction on Windows because Bourne is too deeply embedded in the Unix world"?

> "Do you consider PowerShell to be "something we can count on to exist on Windows systems"

Once, yes; then they renamed it "Windows PowerShell" and deprecated it so it's no longer being developed. Instead they started trying to appeal to Linux users with new cross-platform "PowerShell" which you have to install separately. Windows PowerShell is increasingly falling behind that in performance and compatibility. We're heading away from "PowerShell included" back to the old world of "if you have to download and install something to get away from this abandonware legacy thing, why not Python or node.js?".

> "a superior alternative to Bourne shells which only got traction on Windows because Bourne is too deeply embedded in the Unix world"?"

It's a superior alternative to Bourne shells on Windows, and because it's basically Microsoft-Perl or Microsoft-Clunky-Python as well as being a shell, as in - it's more capable than Unix shell because it's a kitchen sink of scripting and programming language as well as command line.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#135

Post by jiggawatts »

rektide wrote: post #100
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…

Curl, jq is the good answer here. More from the fringe, I'm quite enjoying zx, a really nodejs powered scripting environment. https://github.com/google/zx Covered somewhat in ZX 3.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195580 (189 points, 8 months ago, 163 points)

These are only vaguely comparable. It’s like saying assembly language is a substitute for something elegant in Haskell.

Technically true in some sense, but not really.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#137

Post by renox »

oefrha wrote: post #36
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…

I'm certain I once wrote a long rant about why I think the concept of PowerShell (using objects instead of text as interface) is interesting but it fell flat on execution and felt like something in the uncanny valley between *nix shells and Python/Perl, with a thousand papercuts. I'm not gonna dig that out, but to add some points I can remember at the moment to yours: - Write-Output and friends try to be smart and pr…

I agree that 'set -x' is the shell superpower, as it shows your scripts behaviour but not the inside of the tools you call.

I'm quite sad that gdb doesn't have something similar: 'step in my application only' no I don't want to step into the STL shared pointer dereference implementation for the n-th time!

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#138

Post by x0n »

einpoklum wrote: post #8
Arnavion wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Neither? It's a superior alternative to cmd.exe. bash has never been a serious contender for Windows. Before PS you always wrote .bat scripts for cmd.exe (or .vbs for cscript.exe if you were really depraved). Nobody except Linux-first FOSS authors would expect Windows users to have cygwin / msys / mingw32 installed. PS gave us a saner choice, though we would still usually bundle it with a .bat wrapper, just to a)…

But instead of coming up with PS, it would have been pretty straightforward to just install bash on Windows. Someone chose to go the PS way rather than the bash way. My question is what the reason was for making this choice. > Nobody except Linux-first FOSS authors Bourne shell and its predecessors and successors are traditional and common on most computer systems since the early 1970s (starting with the Thompson she…

Simply because on Unix, configuration is text files; bash and the gnu utils work with text. In Windows, it's an API driven O/S; powershell uses objects, but will coerce output to strings to allow text parsing if needed.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#139

Post by digisign »

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…

Yes, you can use Python just about anywhere, and it is arguably more sane/readable. Prefer httpie over curl at the command-line as well.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#140

Post by digisign »

wokwokwok wrote: post #57
mjburgess wrote: post #18

I've often wondered why powershell hasnt taken off on linux/mac. I'd guess MS would have a good case for investing there (given, eg., linux usage on azure). Particularly in the recent history of "every day, another shell" on linux/mac. Powershell seems to solve the problem being resolved in rust,go,scala,... over-and-over. Why not just use that?

Look, I’ve written a lot of powershell, and I don’t mind it at all, but its not surprising at all to me. Powershell isn’t in the same problem domain as rust/go/Scala/python. The niche it fills is “calling windows apis from c++” or, more recently, c#. It’s less effort than that, so it’s useful, on windows. It is not less effort than using say, a bash script on other platforms because it: - does not provide unique acce…

+ telemetry-spewing ms products give some of us the willies.
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