this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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After learning PowerShell and then moving to Linux and having to learn bash...I don't get this sentiment. PS is the shit. I can make full GUI applications and automate all kinds of workflows. Their use of objects makes it so easy to extract data and utilize it. Bash feels so much more primitive and clumsy by comparison. What am I missing here?
Mh, it probably depends a lot where you're coming from. I don't need Powershell or have a reason to learn it in my daily work, and I mostly use WSL to access Linux shells everywhere else. And on top of that, I don't understand why Powershell needs a completely different command set to basically every other shell. It's a biased take, but I have not had an interaction with Powershell that I liked, nor have I seen a feature that made me want to look into it more.
What's the killer feature, would you say? Care giving me the fanboy-pitch?
edit. Oh and I forgot, the tab completion in Powershell is so incredibly dumb. I never ever in my life want to cycle through all items in a path, and much less have it be case insensitive. Come to think of it, this might be the origin of most of my disdain. ;)
By far it's the object pipeline. Having structured data makes it easy to automate workflows in a predictable way. With bash everything is a string, so everything has to be parsed. It's tedious.
It took about a year of steady use before I came to enjoy the syntax. It shines in a production environment with other cooks in the kitchen. I never got into the C style, I like my code human readable at a glance. It's fine if everyone's a sage but we have a team with a mixture of skill levels and for me PowerShell gets it right.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I never even second guessed how tedious all the parsing is. But then, as others have said here, as soon as the task at hand reaches a level of complexity beyond grepping, piping and so on I just very naturally move to Python.
On a different note, there are ways to teach bash json. I recall seeing a hacker conference talk on it some time ago, but didn't pay close attention.