[AnthonyMouse]

> Article might be more successful if it demonstrated some of the advantages of PowerShell, such as returning the output as objects instead of lines, and what you can do with them as a result.

The costs of doing this don't get enough mention though. You're essentially locking yourself into an ecosystem.

It's typical in bash to have a pipeline where every program is written in a different language -- shell scripts, Python, C, C++, Rust etc. They can all operate on text, but what is a Python program supposed to do with a Rust object or vice versa?

It only works between two programs that support the same object format. But in that case you're effectively passing an object to a function in the same language. Languages already have that with lower overhead than pipes. Even if you're set on using pipes, nothing really stops you from piping a binary format object from one program to another, as long as they use the same object format.

So I think the people who say to compare PS to python and not bash are right, but it's not even that -- just compare it to any other language that has objects. It can pass the objects easily within the language but not outside of it. That's hardly a novelty. And then, despite the ostensible ports to other platforms, you have the usual drawbacks of vendor-specific languages -- many of the APIs only exist or do something useful on Windows and you're locking yourself into the platform.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Sure, but my understanding is that PowerShell by itself can do alot of the stuff I typically use four or five pipes to accomplish (e.g. `grep regex myFile | sort -u | cut -d ',' -f 3`). In which case, it might not be as much of a problem for most use-cases.

[AnthonyMouse]

Sure it can, but so can one python script. For that matter, so can the four or five pipes. What's so wrong with `grep regex myFile | sort -u | cut -d ',' -f 3` etc.?

[thesuperbigfrog]

It would be nice if PowerShell had object serialization and deserialization functions built into the language or standard library, similar to the Common Lisp read and print functions.

This would make it possible for PowerShell to interoperate with other command line facilities.

[JamesSwift]

Does `ConvertTo-Json` and `ConvertFrom-Json` not handle what you want?

[thesuperbigfrog]

Awesome. Thank you for letting me know about those. I have been using bash and Perl for many years, but have only dabbled in PowerShell since almost all of my work happens on Linux.

I am bookmarking those because I expect to have to use PowerShell for some automation tasks on Windows in the near future.

[chipsa]

PWSH runs on top of the .NET runtime. So you can use any CLI language to write your code: C++, C#, VB, F#, Python, as well as PWSH.

[AnthonyMouse]

So you're locking yourself into an ecosystem. You have to replace everything with .NET.

Even existing things that are written in C++ or Python would have to be specifically rewritten to input and output .NET runtime objects. And why use that rather than any other object format that isn't tied to a specific vendor?