[nailer]

Sad to see this downvoted.

As a 20 year bash veteran: powershell is the first OS default shell that outputs structured data, and looking at objects and selecting the properties you want is a massive improvement than combining bash with sed/grep/awk to scrape text.

Someone bizarrely responds that cmd still exists on Windows for compatibility purposes (though even Win+X starts powershell now) doesn't change this at all.

The README for my powershell profile (which is written from a *nix PoV) has a little more info comparing the two: https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile

[tbyehl]

I'm always amused by these PowerShell threads on HN.

How is it that objects are an accepted thing for basically every programming environment in modern use, yet somehow controversial when it comes to the shell?

The prayer-based text parsing toolchain sucks. It has always sucked, regardless of platform. We put up with it because it was all that we had.

Jeffrey Snover came up with something better and thanks to PS Core we'll be able to use it everywhere!

[nailer]

Yeah - most people would agree that GraphQL is a better way to access data than, say headless Chrome via Puppeteer. Many folk here prefer TeX over Word because the former encourages seperating content from presentation. But when it comes to the shell, suddenly everyone hates the idea.

[dragonwriter]

> How is it that objects are an accepted thing for basically every programming environment in modern use,

They aren't accepted for basically every programming environmental nment in modern use; peak OOP-all-the-things is well in the past, and it's no longer the one paradigm to rule them all, irrespective of use case.

[nailer]

Whether you have methods or functions, you still have hashmaps - bash you scrape values, pwsh you select keys. Pipelines can be considered quite functional too.