PowerShell was great, if a little verbose. PowerShell's real strength though isn't as an interactive shell, its as a scripting language. You pass objects back and forth, not text. Its basically an interactive API explorer.
doesn't matter how the output is formatted, you aren't manipulating text directly you're working with .NET objects.
Anyway, PowerShell is the way it is out of necessity of the OS. Microsoft did try to just port ksh to Windows at one point it obviously failed because Windows isn't text based, system state is stored in WMI, COM, etc not text files.
> ps aux | awk '{if ($6 > 102400) print $11, $6}'
compared to
> Get-Process | Where WorkingSet -gt 100MB | Select Name, WorkingSet
doesn't matter how the output is formatted, you aren't manipulating text directly you're working with .NET objects.
Anyway, PowerShell is the way it is out of necessity of the OS. Microsoft did try to just port ksh to Windows at one point it obviously failed because Windows isn't text based, system state is stored in WMI, COM, etc not text files.
Snover talked about the creation of PowerShell on the Corecursive podcast a couple years ago, well worth a listen: https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-sno...