Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

“Powershell(tm): Not Entirely Awful (if a little quirky)!”

Seems worth investing a lot time into given Microsoft’s history of not rug pulling developers.



The first release was 16 years ago and they're still making new releases of it so I'd say it's definitely here to stay ;)


Also it is MIT-licensed open source today: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell


And cross platform: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta...

Not that it’s a particularly compelling feature on Linux with the standard offering, but it’s a good option for cross platform scripts at times, particularly running in docker.


I mean, if I want something that can run on as many platforms as possible without a prior installation, I stick as closely as I can to posix sh. If I want something more flexible that can run consistently, but may require an installation beforehand, I use python. I don’t really see what niche PowerShell would fill for me.


It doesn't have to fill a niche for you. Before cross-platform PowerShell I certainly used Python for some of those kinds of scripts.

I think a lot of it gets down to ergonomics/aesthetics to decide if you find a useful niche for PowerShell for yourself. Python's os module is powerful and lets you run/chain almost any native commands and shell operations you want to spawn, but it is still a very different API and abstraction with different ergonomics and aesthetics than shell-style pipes and redirects.

PowerShell gives you that focus on shell-like pipes/redirects, but then gives you some Python-like power on top of that to also work with the outputs of some commands as objects in a scripting environment. There's a lot of interesting value to comparing/contrasting PowerShell and Python and if you are happy with Python maybe there isn't a big reason to learn PowerShell. PowerShell is there for when you are doing a lot of shell-like processing pipelines and want to write them as such, but have some of that power of a language like Python behind it. It's a lot more powerful than posix sh and it is similarly but differently powerful to Python but it starts from a REPL that looks/acts more like posix sh. I don't know if you have a need for that niche yourself, but I find it useful for that.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: