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Comment by tpio | Hacker News Reader

On a really, really shitty platform without a package manager and a decent CLI.

I've done barely any MS development to speak of. However, I have done extensive development using CLI-based tools and I've used excellent IDEs like Jetbrains'. The power a good, integrated tool gives you over less integrated environments is tremendous. I rarely need the CLI anymore for development, so maybe with good enough tooling it doesn't matter.

Now, I hear MS' tools compare favorably with Jetbrains'. If that's true, that sounds like a pretty decent platform to me.

um, really shitty platform i nwhat regard? Also, VS has had a package manager for a while and Powershell is more than capable

I don't understand the people who compare PowerShell to a CLI on Unix/Linux. They're worlds apart and not even comparable. PowerShell is like a little set of APIs you can use to get at data - nothing outside of that, play within the rules - but those APIs are pretty good when they do exist.

Unix/Linux CLI is a core set of tools that get you at literally everything you could want and give you unbounded power and flexibility.

Worlds apart.

"PowerShell is like a little set of APIs you can use to get at data - nothing outside of that, play within the rules "

Bullshit. It's engineering rule that all Microsoft products have all the admin capabilities exposed via powershell.

Most admin gui's are now simply a call to a powershell command.

You can pipe, and redirect input/output just like unix shells.

Microsoft fanboy here (and OP of this sub-thread). PowerShell is a great example of how the two camps never meet in the middle. The syntax is mind-numbingly stupid. Also it's a scripting language not a shell -- but if they called it PowerScript people would just make fun of it for being bad Python. The syntax is hideous.

And let's not talk about the shell itself which -- dear lord.

Meanwhile Unix folk will never realize how much time they waste with broken scripts that have three sets of nested escaped quotes just so they can get text from one place to another -- even though "plain text is everything" hasn't really solved problems in a robust fashion since the 80s. Add in six different variations on regular expressions, a couple Python 2 vs 3 wars, endless battles of how to handle service startup, and the the fact that basic tools like sed and grep are stuck in some BSD never-never land on the Mac and you've got yourself a real mess.

So when you're writing a script to move users, mailboxes and databases around? Maybe that PowerShell ain't so verbose after all. Better to type a little more now than deal with the pissed-off VP with an umlaut in his name later.

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