[i_s]

> It is a complete re-imagining of what a shell scripting language is. Hardly surprising that it isn't backwards compatible

By why does having richer return types necessarily mean you need to deviate from most other languages for the escape character (backtick in Powershell, but usually backslash)? That doesn't seem related, and it greatly impacts the initial impressions people get.

> The thing that disappoints me is that nobody from the *NIX world has tried to bring the same ideas there. They're good ideas.

I agree, and I hope someone does. But if they do, I hope they just focus on the ideas, and leave out the small and unimportant incompatibilities powershell decided to add.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

PowerShell was developed on Windows which uses '\' as the path separator by default. Using it as an escape character would be kind of confusing.