Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by UK-AL 4030 days ago
You've given no actual information to why it's inferior, other the fact it's not "exploratory". I don't know what that means.

But personally I find working out command names in powershell much more sane, because of the Verb-Noun pair naming convention.
2 comments
eropple 4029 days ago
It's not about the commands. Names, whatever. I learned GNU and BSD command sets cold, names and obscura are not a problem. It's about the experience of using the thing. Everything is so insanely verbose, except when line-noise symbols are injected to break up the monotony, and the editing environment for actually using it is absolute garbage compared to either bash or zsh's emacs/vim modes. You are stuck writing long, complex (not complicated, but complex) commands that can't be easily factored down, with an interface that isn't doing much to help you (and isn't good at the little things besides, ISE is unacceptable compared to a decent terminal emulator like iTerm2). And so iterating--exploring your problem space is unreasonably difficult compared to everybody else in the same space.

A shell is a REPL. If your language makes actually writing things in that REPL hard, it is definitionally bad at Shell Stuff. I find it significantly easier to write code in C# and then transliterate it to PowerShell than to actually write PowerShell. That's a disastrously bad situation for a shell.

link
useerup 4029 days ago
You were called upon to give some examples. Yet all you offer is more hyperbole. One is beginning to suspect that despite your assertion that you "know" Powershell better than most who use it daily, you are actually just a troll.

Yes, I am calling you out. I am challenging you to provide concrete examples where Powershell has less discoverability than bash or zsh. I am challenging you to explain why ISE - an environment designed specifically to combine REPL with script authoring - is "unacceptable".

And please, no more hyperbole or condescending remarks.

link
Amezarak 4030 days ago
I'm not sure what he means by exploratory either.

I learned Powershell mostly from Get-Help. I can usually figure out where to look for a command based on the naming conventions - essentially (one of x verbs)-(one of x nouns). They aren't always fantastic, but for example, Select-String is a little more obvious than grep.

link