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Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

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Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#61
post #17

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"?

(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.).

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#62

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…

Perfectly stated! Powershell is fantastic…for windows.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#63
post #47
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

HN guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#65
In the late 2000s or early 2010s is when I first read about PowerShell (v1? it was still bleeding edge) and my jaws dropped.

Ability to work with both .NET and COM objects? Piping objects and not strings?

Absolutely amazing and useful tech, and I had to reread to make sure I wasn’t reading about some future plan.

I wonder which division pushed hard to demote; the Windows division?

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#66
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…

Probably he was still getting paid a lot? It is MSFT after all.

I imagine that a certain kind of person, willing to write tooling and even get demoted for it, is willing to stick around with a bit of a pay cut anyways.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#67
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

HN guidelines: > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sigh. it's not a comment on the downvote, it's a call to those down voting to participate to enhance the convo. If you read the rest of the guidelines, they also state not to cite the guidelines as a reply.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#68
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And even the com integration is poor. Trying to script anything to do with Outlook is so failure prone and unreliable it turned me off powershell altogether.

I've actually installed Powershell on my Linux PC last year. I daily drive a Linux box, but I sometimes have to interact with my employer's MS ecosystem (that's technically not my job, so running Linux is fine most of the time).

After waiting for the installation to do god knows what for what felt like ever (and I was running an 8 core Xeon with a fast NVMe drive at the time...) I attempted to connect to the Office 365 tenant to do something.

Since it was my first attempt at running this on Linux, I was following along with the MS docs (actual docs.ms, not the TechNet circus) and I started getting uncomfortable with statements along the lines of "this should work". I mean, if you're not sure, who can be?

Anyway, it managed to install whatever libraries it wanted, so I was ready to go. But everything ended abruptly with some "incorrect credentials" or similar. The credentials were, of course, OK (they worked fine in the web-based admin console). But after some digging, it turned out that, contrary to what the MS docs said, you can't connect to Office365 from linux...

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#69
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

HN guidelines: > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You know what makes for boring reading? People not engaging in discussion at all and just relying on downvotes to convey their opinion.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#70
post #66
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…

Probably he was still getting paid a lot? It is MSFT after all. I imagine that a certain kind of person, willing to write tooling and even get demoted for it, is willing to stick around with a bit of a pay cut anyways.

What other interesting jobs are available in the region, how willing are you and your family to move, etc., so many factors.
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