How bad is the Windows command line really?

How bad is the Windows command line really?
blog.nullspace.io

... and it's all true.

1. The parser allows modifying a .bat file during its execution and having those changes execute without restarting the Batch interperter. [1] This is in keeping with the rationale for batch processing -- facilitating serial execution of computationally expensive operations.

2. The Batch interpreter allows self modifying code.[2] In the early 1980's when Batch was designed, sophisticated COBOL programmers might have felt right at home. Lisper's were probably more hit and miss.

This is a case where historical context is useful. Today, it might perhaps be worth mentioning Powershell in a discussion of the Windows command line. Batch was the DOS command line and exists in Windows for evolutionary reasons.

In the days when abundant RAM and fast CPU speeds were prefixed with "mega" and distributed computing often happened at BAUD rates, not restarting a process was a big deal. More importantly, then as today, the execution speed of the batch interpreter was not a critical section of a batch process.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/906586/changing-a-batch-...

[2]: http://swag.outpostbbs.net/DOS/0019.PAS.html

I'm a Microsoft fanboy and I find Python far more structured and faster than any of the above for anything beyond the most simple shell scripts. (If only the inventor of PowerShell had spent ten minutes outside the Microsoft ecosystem before locking himself in a seafoam green office for two years...)

Doesn't solve the IT admin scenarios PowerShell is good for but I don't go there. And if I did, I'd use C# anyway. No need to learn a new language to loop and call objects, that's solved.

With the .NET Core stuff, I'm using C# and Microsoft.DotNet.Cli.Utils and the end result is briefer and saner than Python argparse, and file operations work great cross platform. Less issues than even Python, plus I can use LINQ to sort and remove dupes. Handy.

As for the "Windows command line" (cmd.exe) well, it still sucks. Console2 plus Clink and ... well, you'll still miss zsh on cygwin or what just works out of box on Mac... but, hey, it's a start.