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Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

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Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#91

Post by tptacek »

rtpg wrote: post #66
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…

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.

The Microsoft of that time period was infamous for deliberately paying less than other tech giants.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#92

Post by agent86 »

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 Select queries against, etc.

I find myself feeling like I'm missing something helpful when I'm on a Mac/Linux device. Is there a similar go to in the Mac/Linux world for this type of stuff? My current thinking is that I either have to start picking up Python or building a mental map of wget/awk/grep type commands that can be chained together for a similar effect, but I thought it best to try to learn from the wisdom of others first :-)

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#93

Post by csours »

outside1234 wrote: post #84

I have worked at Microsoft off and on for more than 20 years and it is insane how many disaster stories boil down to super horrible Windows management. “.NET cross platform?” -> Windows screwed it up “Phones” -> Windows screwed it up “Azure Linux VM” -> Windows screwed it up (but thankful we fired them and fixed it) One of best things Satya has done is essentially fire almost all of these morons.

"Remember the human". Do you start with the assumption that the product has to fit into Windows and do things the Windows way? Or do you start with the assumption that humans are going to use the product and make it in such a way that people can and want to use it.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#94

Post by archi42 »

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?

wokwokwok, cobbal and oefrha made excellent points in the sibling comments.

The only thing new PowerShell brings to the table is to pipe structured objects instead of only arbitrary data. And for that you don't need PowerShell itself: The power of the Linux shell isn't really the shell itself, it's in the powerful tools you can call from it and how you can interact with the Kernel and other components of the OS. The shell just gives you a simple interface and the ability to glue lots of small tools together. I think the reason we don't have a popular PowerShell clone, a "shell-with-objects", is that we would need to change how a lot of these tools handle basic data IO. I would love to see that, because sometimes parsing text is annoying, mental overhead; especially when filenames containing whitespaces are involved; but then there are always scripting languages waiting to help out (e.g. I tend to use perl kind of "super powerful shell script").

Also, what's "every day, another shell"? I have been using bash nearly two decades now, with the odd script written for pure sh in case it might be shipped to a customer. After Manjaro duped my into using zsh (I think they changed the default) I am now growing fond of the improved completion and history; but I could still stick to bash without being on a deprecated track.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#95

Post by paramost »

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…

Not a seasoned mac/Linux user, but would powershell core not work? I believe it's cross platform?

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#96

Post by chokolad »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #71
mjburgess wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, I needed to teach myself PS for an azure-focused client of mine -- and I did so on mac (incidentally, making notes in a jupyter notebook with PS backend). It's a weird language, but I always reminded myself of its competitor: bash -- which is perhaps an order of magnitude more weird. It feels like it could be a "shell language for the cloud", ie., the language for cross-OS cloud automation work.

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.

there are wonderful books, that go deep into the language, or provide bunch of solutions to practical problems. Pick your poison:

Powershell in Depth [1]

Powershell Cookbook [2]

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/powershell-in-depth

[2] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/powershell-cookbook-4th...

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#97

Post by jhugo »

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

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#98

Post by pouting »

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…

Powershell 7 is cross-platform.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#99

Post by magospietato »

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…

Is there a similar go to in the Mac/Linux worlds? Yeah, it's called Powershell 7! Powershell was ported to cross platform dotnet a few years back. Currently running some Powershell scripts in production on a Linux box.

Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

#100

Post by rektide »

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)

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