Warning: This article contains swearing (Quoted, from Bill Gates).
As a UNIX-aligned engineer, I’ve always looked down on anything Microsoft.
But a recent cross-platform project forced me to learn PowerShell — a technology which, just like blockchain, is amusing by how its core idea almost makes sense.
I want to explore the psychological impact that a piece of documentation had on me. A political piece on par with Machiavelli, “The Monad Manifesto.”
The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.
The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.
I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…
PowerShell is fantastic in practice but whenever I think of writing shell scripts I think of bash first.
Bash is a lot more pleasant to work with overall, the biggest concern most people have is that it can be cryptic. IMO PowerShell scripts can be the exact same kind of voodoo.