[arch-general] Opinions on PowerShell?

[Lee Burton]

It's always been my opinion that PowerShell (powerscript?) has been poorly
named -- it's a lackluster /shell/ although things like
psreadline,powershell_ise,etc make it less awful as a shell on windows but
it's great as interpreted (ish -- see DLR/JIT) .NET -- you can compile C#
inside of it or call any .NET library you have laying around. It is a
scripted programming language .. comparing soley to zsh/bash is a bit like
comparing zsh/bash to python/irb with some shortcuts/syntax sugar to make
it more "shell"-like.
Lee

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 6:49 PM, Eli Schwartz via arch-general <
arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> On 08/18/2016 09:28 PM, Hunter Connelly via arch-general wrote:
> > While I tend to prefer Unix-style shells, there are *some* things that
> > PowerShell does better.
> >
> > Here's an example I found on Reddit in the thread about this on /r/linux.
> > Both of the following commands find the size and name of the three
> largest files
> > in a directory.
> >
> > Bash:        ls -l | sed 's/ \+/,/g' | cut -d',' -f 5,9 | sort -g | tail
> -3
> > PowerShell:  ls -file | sort -pr length | select length, name -l 3
> >
> > What seems to be the most noticable difference is that PowerShell, being
> an
> > object-oriented language, pipes objects instead of raw text. I think
> this might
> > make many things easier while writing scripts.
>
> Excellent, let us programmatically parse the contents of `ls`!
>
> What, exactly, is wrong with the bash command:
> find . -maxdepth 1 -printf '%s %p\n'|sort -nr|head -3
>
> I will agree that if your godawful bash command was what you had to
> compare to PowerShell, then PowerShell would be better...
>
> But by all means, pick and choose, then compare bad bash to good
> PowerShell if you feel it makes your point better.
>
> As for objects, if you feel you need them you are probably doing
> something complex enough to justify an actual scripted programming
> language e.g. Python.
> But I doubt you have that great a need for an interactive shell.
>
> --
> Eli Schwartz