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by philstephenson 1981 days ago
Lots of people here suggesting the main benefit of PowerShell is its object model and indeed that is very useful, but there are other great features as well. First and foremost, PowerShell basically has a command line parameter framework built in. You also have a runtime backed by one of the best standard libraries out there (.NET) - one in which you can easily reach into anywhere in your PowerShell scripts. It also has a module ecosystem supporting development in either PowerShell or C# proper. And now with PowerShell core it's cross platform. PowerShell also supports pipelines, but I mention this last because it's obviously not a distinguisher for it with bash. It's really not even a contest, PowerShell is way more... well, powerful than bash. Since I've become proficient I would never go back to bash.
2 comments
ojnabieoot 1981 days ago
This isn’t necessarily something I’m proud of, but at my old C# job I would do inline C# in Powershell as a very hackish “C# REPL” for prototyping and interactive testing. At the time C# Interactive in Visual Studio was unreliable and I found it easier to just copy-paste C# code into a Powershell script.

It seems that C# Interactive has gotten better (and since leaving that job I have switched to 100% F# for .NET stuff). But a more useful application is using Powershell to bundle a .NET class library into a flexible, low-weight, modular command line application for internal use. For instance, a C# library which does serious analytics on large data, and then a Powershell script that deals with easier annoyances like AWS authentication or FTP access, argument parsing, and so on. Obviously a real .exe is a better long-term solution but I found Powershell worked really well for rapidly sharing compiled .NET code into a tool that data scientists on my team could use.

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mmgutz 1981 days ago
I don't think it's a question of it being more powerful than bash. Why does it need to be? I'm not going to use shell script to write apps. There are better scripting languages like python and node for scripting non-trivial apps.
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