[JoshTriplett]

> I’m willing to admit that PowerShell isn’t obviously better as a shell than something like bash, but it’s unquestionably a better language to use for scripting.

There's a missing "on Windows" here. Sure, PowerShell is clearly a tool designed for the Windows environment. And if you're a Windows system administrator, it has more tools and glue for that environment. You could use PowerShell to replace things that you'd otherwise have to write in Python or similar, not shell.

But that doesn't make it "unquestionably a better language to use for scripting" overall; it makes it a better fit for its target platform, which is certainly true.

And an earlier part of the document made exactly that point: PowerShell on Linux would be as uncomfortable as Cygwin is on Windows. There's an impedance mismatch there.

[InclinedPlane]

I've lived in both the windows and linux/unix worlds and I will say that powershell is a better scripting language than bash. Bash is ok, but powershell is nicer. Powershell is sort of like python in that it tends to force down a path of doing things in a certain way.

Powershell isn't just "more tools and glue for windows stuff", it's a different way of doing things. In powershell you get named command-line parameters for free, that's a huge win. You get usage messages and simplified man-page help baked into the way things work, that's also huge. In powershell you don't just work with text, you work with objects, which pass along the pipeline. That means that instead of using sed and awk to muck up the output of some other script you can just use simple select, where, and format commands. This is incredibly powerful and an area where linux has fallen behind.

I like linux a lot, but this attitude of sneering down at windows and powershell merely because it's not linux is amateurish and parochial. People should be thinking about adapting the innovations that powershell has made and building on them instead of looking at it as some bizarre alien beast that will never be relevant to them.

[JoshTriplett]

I'm not sneering at PowerShell because it's not Linux. And I think it's an impressive model. It's certainly a different way of doing things, and it's worth looking at and learning from.

But Powershell people dismiss the bash and Linux model of "everything's a file", too, the same way others dismiss the Powershell model. They're different; neither is "unquestionably" better for all cases.

Personally, once I start wanting stateful objects I can pass around to multiple methods, I switch from Bash to Python or Rust. I don't think Bash fits that use case well either, but that's not the only use case around.

[clinta]

Personally I think an interactive shell that works well with objects is incredibly valuable. I love working in PowerShell and I wish there was a good Python based shell that I could use to replace zsh. I spend a lot of time in iPython but it's not quite the same.

[wvenable]

If you take away the platform and command differences, then Bash is a worse scripting language than Powershell. Bash is a rough programming language to work in.

This whole comment about "on Windows" is completely beside the point. And the impedance mismatch, as you said, was already commented about in the article.

[JoshTriplett]

> Bash is a worse scripting language than Powershell

Debatable, and certainly not "unquestionably" as the article suggests. You could certainly make the argument, but you don't get to drop the mic afterward.

[scott_karana]

Bash has notorious gotchas, and similarly, doesn't work well natively on Windows without a whole slew of associated applets.

Sounds like both shells have one of those problems... ;)

[nailer]

> There's a missing "on Windows" here.

A Powershell object piping system would be great on Unix too. Scraping text is fragile and slow.

Obviously for a Unix port you wouldn't write cmdlets in .net like Powershell but something popular in the Linux/Unix admin world, most likely Python.