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Comment by vnorilo | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the insight. I don't do a lot of powershell daily, but the last time I had a big batch job I was disappointed in how clunky it was to make a foreach-object -like pipeline utilize a sensible number of processes. I have forgotten the details but I think I needed some sort for add-on that split jobs across processes. Also, the pipeline wasn't pipelined in the parallelism-sense.

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No problem. I'm certainly not an expert, but that is mainly due to the deficiency I mention above. I'd use it for a lot more use cases if it could handle those scenarios.

I think Powershell "jobs" can help run things in parallel, but I've never done more than just read about it. The Powershell in Action book (3rd edition) covers that functionality I think. The first chapter to that book is pretty awesome.

My dream as someone forced to use Windows would be for Microsoft to use some dollars to make Powershell a one stop shop for data science, simple games (think commodore sprites), numerical computing...etc. That sounds a little wacky I know, but I think people would appreciate every computer shipping with a powerful environment like that. Since Powershell is built on .NET, surely someone could make a library for Powershell that abstracts away some of the .NET complexity to where I can just do something like:

Process-Data -data "blah.csv" | Create-PieChart -output "chart.png"

Not having to install Anaconda and import a ton of libraries on the target computer would be helpful. Note that I'm not saying to reproduce all of Matlab in Powershell, but putting some of the most popular routines as built-in commands would be pretty awesome.

I like the sound of your dream, but I don't think there's much commercial return on making a fun to play with 8-bit home computer environment. That's what Raspberry Pi wanted to be, and instead it became "cheap web browser host" and geek paperweight. The PS team is small, their real goal seem to be to encourage you to Azure through managing it with PS from any OS.

It would be up to "the community" to make modules to do this kind of thing, which would be possible if anyone wanted to, but unlikely to ship with Windows.

> putting some of the most popular routines as built-in commands would be pretty awesome.

Microsoft's push is to avoid more "bloat" by leaning more heavily on optional modules installed from the PS Gallery. But `group-object` is a builtin for doing a kind of SQL GROUP BY operation, and Measure-Object just gained a -StandardDeviation option, and there's now ConvertTo/From-Json, and ConvertFrom-Markdown. If there is a basic routine that would be popular and fit many use-cases, you could request it at https://github.com/powerShell/PowerShell/issues/

There is a GPL licensed scientific computing framework called Accord.NET, it's not wrapped for PS but can be used almost directly, and some of these others might be viable as well:

http://accord-framework.net/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/5ijcj7/kmeans_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numerical_libraries#.N...

Thanks for your thoughts. You're probably right about the pipe dream.

I agree that there isn't much commercial incentive, but I honestly don't see why major OS providers can't include some basic graphics primitives in the OS. I'm not talking about embedding the unreal engine or anything. It could be used for a lot more than primitive games btw.

I understand the desire to avoid more bloat. I can't believe Windows 10 requires the storage and RAM that it does.

The XML & JSON objects are pretty cool.

I'll check out Accord.NET framework too.

> I was disappointed in how clunky it was to make a foreach-object -like pipeline utilize a sensible number of processes

Yes, that's a common complaint. And PowerShell 7 has just gained this with a new `foreach-object -parallel` parameter:

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/10229

Which should help at least some cases. (PoshRsJob is a reasonably easy / fast way to use multiple processors inside the same overall Powershell process (with RunSpaces).

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