Comment by hi-v-rocknroll

The problem of powershell is not merely thet it's new and different, and not merely that you have to learn a new and different way to get a given task done.

Powershell makes some things possible or easier that weren't possible or easy, but only at the expense of making other things either impossible or at least vastly less practical, and all in all it's a bad trade off and a wrong set of priorities for the job it claims to fill, or at least for the job bash currently fills. It's not that bash is a gold standard, just that it's not fundamentally wrong.

I was scripting on a windows machine which didn’t have WSL setup and decided to learn PowerShell. After a week or so of scripting with PowerShell and seeing how intuitive and robust the syntax is, something changed in my brain and I decided I never again wanted to deal with bash and its endless quirks and brittleness. It’s unnatural to have to wrap every variable access with “${}”, that unnatural key sequence always caused a break in my flow. Anyway I reach for Python sooner and really hunger for a clean, robust nix shell. I hope powershell has instilled this in many people and it drives adoption of something better

> too radical having to reimagine/replace/relearn almost everything

I switched to zsh because at the time I thought it had better autocomplete, but honestly I use it as I would bash. And I don't think it was worth it to change a little bit.

To change shell I think the change _should_ be radical.

Interesting thought experiment. Reminds me of my cousin's project Xonsh https://xon.sh/

A day or so there was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558081

Imagine your shell's model not being a command line console but a spreadsheet!

> One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.

Was that not VMS?

> One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony

I mean, there's a reason text was selected, it's the lowest common denominator. What you're asking for is universal FFI, which we already have that for the most part: C. The problem ultimately turns into runtime and resource management issues when crossing language boundaries, that is, unless you use OS primatives (pipes, sockets, shared memory, processes, etc.) and use message passing/pipelines exclusively. Then we're back to plaintext.

There's a ton of non-printable characters in ASCII that are useful as delimiters for non-keyboard interactive programs that are largely vestigial. One could at least consider reusing them for delimiters and special control sequences for message passing, but without some sort of standardization it's limited in practical use.

> One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.

That's a neat idea, and sounds like something that could be built on graalvm.

There are shells out there that sit between PowerShell / Nu and the old guards like Bash / Zsh.

Ones that support data structures out-of-the-box (like any et al) but also work perfectly fine with existing UNIX commands (like Bash).

Maybe tabular data is a credible intermediate step. Many shell tools already export data in a tabular format.

To me the silly hang-up for PowerShell is none of that, but the strange syntax. I'd taken (even!) JavaScript-ish syntax over that.