[ripley12]

I'm one of the Nushell developers, and one of the main reasons I joined the project was that I couldn't find a cross-platform shell I was happy with.

PowerShell has a _lot_ of baggage. I don't like a lot of their design decisions (ex: the super verbose naming, the continue-on-error default that makes scripting a pain), and it's unlikely that those decisions will ever be revisited.

I tried pretty seriously to use PowerShell as my daily driver on Linux and macOS 2 years ago and was disappointed. Too many rough edges and Windows-first features.

PowerShell's startup performance is also pretty rough; I was seeing startup times around 2s after some minor profile customization.

I think Nushell addresses all of those points well; it's got nice concise syntax, solid support for Mac/Windows/Linux, and instant startup times. On the other hand, Nushell's less polished+stable than PowerShell; we're still making breaking changes to the syntax+commands.

[alkonaut]

> the super verbose naming

Isn’t long names but short aliases the pragmatic way of solving the naming problem? “ls” or “dir” is perfect when typing interactive but in a long program I don’t mind typing something longer out.

Startup perf is definitely an issue but otoh that doesn’t feel like a design decision that couldn’t be fixed.

[ripley12]

But then you have 2 names to remember.

PowerShell's approach to naming is divisive. I'm not saying it's objectively bad, but I'm in the camp that doesn't like it.