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Comment by Storment33

13 hours ago

I had no idea 'pwsh' was PowerShell. Personally not interested, maybe if your a Microsoft shop or something then yeah.

3 comments

Storment33

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WorldMaker  11 hours ago

"pwsh" is often used as the short-hand for modern cross-platform PowerShell to better differentiate it from the old Windows-only PowerShell.

I think pwsh is worth exploring. It is cross-platform. It is post-Python and the Python mantra that "~~code~~ scripts are read more often than they are written". It provides a lot of nice tools out of the box. It's built in an "object-oriented" way, resembling Python and owing much to C#. When done well the "object-oriented" way provides a number of benefits over "dumb text pipes" that shells like bash were built on. It is easy to extend with C# and a few other languages, should you need to extend it.

I would consider not dismissing it off hand without trying it just because Microsoft built it and/or that it was for a while Windows-only.

  • ptx  7 hours ago

    It's also both a larger download and slower to start than Java, which is not known for being light and nimble. In fact, PowerShell is so slow that you can both compile and run the equivalent C# program before PowerShell finishes launching. Not ideal for a shell or a scripting language.

    Also, the newer versions aren't included with Windows, which would have been useful – instead Windows includes an incompatible older version that admonishes you to download the new version. But why would you download several hundred megabytes of pwsh when you can equally well download any other language runtime?

    Also, it sends "telemetry" to Microsoft by default.

    Also, the error handling is just awful, silencing errors by default, requiring several different incantations to fix.

    Also, the documentation is vague and useless. And the syntax is ugly.