PowerShell is an absolutely amazing scripting language; it gets things done way quicker than Bash, because it's object oriented, and you don't have to call external tools to get anything done (sed, grep, find, touch, curl, etc.). It can even run raw C# code for you.
This definitely falls into the category for me of "things that I wasn't there for."
Because I learned computers when DOS was a thing, I will always be able to write a .bat or use CMD when necessary, but having been on the UNIX/Linux side since 2003, I didn't learn C# or PowerShell but rather bash, php, ruby. So while I'm friendly with modern Windows now that they closed up the "is it a stable OS" gap with Apple, I don't really know what to do in PowerShell and am more likely to use WSL!
PowerShell is the closest of Xerox PARC REPL experience that ships in the box on modern platforms.
Because not only it is a proper programming language, it is integrated into .NET, COM/DLLs as well, so not only you can script the OS, any application automation library is exposed as well.
Nowadays, it is possible to automate anything on Windows via PowerShell, the same OS APIs exposed by GUIs are also accessible to PowerShell.
On UNIX side there are things like Fish shell that also offer these capabilities, but they aren't widely adopted as PowerShell on Windows.
Sorry, but Powershell is not a programming language. It has way too many quirks and gotchas to qualify as a programming language. It is an interactive scripting language first, and a scripted language second. But a programming language it is not.
To give just one example: its automatic boxing and unboxing of arrays disqualifies it as a programming language. Try to return a one-element array from a Powershell function and you'll see what I mean.
It's worth learning at any age, especially now that it is an open-source, cross-platform shell. The PS Koans [1] that recently showed up on HN seemed an interesting way to try to learn it.
I just want a shell that runs my commands, I don't want yet another language.
The _beauty_ of bash is you can learn the basics of the language very easily, call out to external tools, and _take that knowledge with you_. Those tools exist independently.
I’ve tried to switch to Powershell a few different times and I always find it to occupy this no man’s land between a quality shell and a quality scripting language. As a shell I find it inferior to BASH and as a scripting language I find it inferior to Python.
