Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
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Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#2[deleted]
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#3Question 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"?
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#4Question 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"?
... 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) make it double-clickable and b) set `-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted`.
If you're asking "is PS better than bash", then sure it's better in some ways and worse in others, but that question only makes sense on Linux where bash is actually an option.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#5I find this twitter thread frustrating.
Q: What was the justification for the demotion? What became of the leaders that made that decision?
A: It was stranger than you can possibly imagine
I think the gist of the story is that he was assigned to work on X but worked on Y instead. Notwithstanding how great Y idea turned out to be it seems he was demoted for insubordination?
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#6I find this twitter thread frustrating. Q: What was the justification for the demotion? What became of the leaders that made that decision? A: It was stranger than you can possibly imagine I think the gist of the story is that he was assigned to work on X but worked on Y instead. Notwithstanding how great Y idea turned out to be it seems he was demoted for insubordination?
Twitter threads are frustrating no matter the content, after two replies I get a banner that blocks me from reading until I register.
Not gonna happen.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#7I find this twitter thread frustrating. Q: What was the justification for the demotion? What became of the leaders that made that decision? A: It was stranger than you can possibly imagine I think the gist of the story is that he was assigned to work on X but worked on Y instead. Notwithstanding how great Y idea turned out to be it seems he was demoted for insubordination?
Twitter threads are frustrating no matter the content, after two replies I get a banner that blocks me from reading until I register. Not gonna happen.
Yep, I'm doubly less likely to sign up when you pull that crap.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#8Question 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"?
... 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 shell in 1971; see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_shell )
so, I would argue actually the other way around. "Everybody except Windows-only closed-source authors would expect people to have bash or similar shell working." The question is, why go for PS instead of adopting a regular shell.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#9Question 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"?
the latter, though I may have some Stockholm syndrome. killer features:
* objects are streamed, not text. I look upon sed and awk and their ilk as stone knives and bear skins. why not just dot into fields?
* first-class interaction with libraries. I can import managed DLLs and call their methods. I don't have to build weird little one-off tools or expose porcelain. I can get at everything, it's profoundly hackable in an un-Windows way.
* the language is vectorized - basically like broadcast operators in something like NumPy. $x.foo gives you x's foo if x is an object, or an array of foos if x is an array of objects. it's really really nice.
* separate commands in one binary and argument (sets) are first-class. there's consistent rules about what "-i" will be short for. personally, I can pull all the valid commands and arguments automatically into my accessibility software for voice typing. the whole standard "verb-noun" thing also makes commands be what you expect and discoverable.
things I don't like include the language itself, its weird bindings to .NET (it predated the C# dynamic support and modern collection types), the restriction to .NET, bad support for streams (not sequences), the slowness, and the syntax looks a bit goofy. but it's worth the warts.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#10Earlier 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…
I'm really not sure what your point is.
>Someone chose to go the PS way rather than the bash way.
Are you asking about users or the Microsoft employees who work on Windows? Users don't want to install either bash or PS, which is why before PS existed all scripts were written for cmd.exe which was guaranteed to be available. Microsoft employees would have no benefit from adding bash to Windows given its license, and PS integrates better with the OS anyway. The author of PS is already on record that one of the original reasons was to integrate better with WMI etc [1]; given how hard / impossible it is to munge the output of ls etc in bash it should be no surprise than an object-based shell with saner expansion rules works better.
>> Nobody except Linux-first FOSS authors
>Bourne shell and its predecessors and successors are [...]
You don't have to give me a history lesson. What you said has nothing to do with the fact that the only people who expected Windows users to have bash were Linux software authors, because their software only supported being built by bash scripts (and required make, configure, perl, what have you). Windows software itself, whether open or closed source, was built using cmd.exe scripts or VS project files.