[tacticus]

the problem with powershell is that it is incredibly stupid if you're not on a full windows stack (desktops, servers and near enough to everything inbetween) and running the most recent version of windows (ever tried getting winrm installed and reliably working on a 2008 box?)

perhaps if they were not too opposed early on to horrible open source things and just one of the languages that already fit fairly well in that area (python for example) they wouldn't have had to go out of their way to make pretty shitty hacks (i really wonder if anyone in the powershell\winrm team did any testing or development with the machines more than 10 metres away)

[Raesan]

Yeah, PS remoting is basically a no-go before server 2012, and even then it's just barely functional enough to be occasionally useful. They're planning on adding SSH support though, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

I don't think something like Python would have been a good choice to use instead of PS. While I'm sympathetic to the complaint that PS is more of a programming language than a shell, that's even more true of Python. I use PS as a shell far more often than I use it for complicated scripting, and as much as I like Python, I just can't see using it as a shell.