Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

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First, I like PowerShell - sufficiently much to have used it as a login shell _on macOS_ for a while.

However, you grossly overestimate the “awesome”. To answer each “angry dude” point in turn:

- The verbosity is fine - in scripts, one should fully expand command names. Interactively, `gci` is fine (or the `ls` alias, though some of the default aliases are travesties).

- The startup time is insane. I start a new terminal window hundreds of times per day, and the startup time is what made me abandon POSH.

- Apache 2 licensed, so I don’t care. I do default to assuming that MSFT are doing something shady though, and I’m right [1].

- RTFMing is perfectly fine (and Get-Help has high quality documentation for built-ins), but one must accept that most users will not. ISE (if it existed outside of Windows) was a nice workaround for needing this.

- Python, Ruby, Go, Node and Perl are all more portable (see my last comment about FreeBSD support).

As an interactive shell, nushell [2] is probably the closest thing to the PowerShell experience which is not tied to .NET Core.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft... [2]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell

So your answers just confirm my 'angry dude' bullet list.

As far as I can see, the only really problematic one is startup time, which is surely something that will be resolved in the future. I witnessed this only rarely while I use PowerShell on Windows and Linux - it was on windows and it was on VM with very slow disk, and some modules that each keep functions separated by files.

I welcome nushell development, but you can't really compare it to pwsh - even if they continue developing it, its decade or so from being usable as main shell.

> you grossly overestimate the “awesome”.

Nah, its awesome. I save bunch of time any time I open the PowerShell. And any time when one tries to be quicker in some other language one is not, eventually.

In that case you cannot see sufficiently far: telemetry on by default is a non-starter. If the startup time were going to be fixed “real soon now”, it would have improved since 2006. It has not, especially when basic usability enhancements like “posh-git” are enabled.

> [nushell is a] decade or so from being usable as a main shell

News to me. I replaced Powershell with NuShell.

> it would have improved since 2006

cross platform pwsh is just few years old

> I replaced Powershell with NuShell.

Sure, you can replace it with LOLCAT either, its totally legit.

Regarding startup time, I can't believe there is such drama. If that troubles you so much, you can easily workaround it by always keeping powershell process pool ready in the background (1 or 2 suspended instances until you use them).

> you can easily workaround it by always keeping powershell process pool ready in the background (1 or 2 suspended instances until you use them).

This is a pretty absurd take when the discussion is about alternative shells for writing scripts. Shell scripts are everywhere. A fairly heavily used UNIX box might easily execute hundreds of shell scripts every minute. A startup time of several seconds makes it completely unusable.

Not sure what to tell you to break your bubble. I have literary thousands of pwsh scripts running in critical gov projects in production, most of them as part of CI, CD, build and automatic test but some of them serving millions of users. I had dozen of such projects in previous decade on Windows and several on Linux and never had any significant problem with slow startup really. Sometimes it happened that some machines had slow startup but team usually fixed that one way or another.

Pattern of usage of bash scripts where hundreds of shell script run every minute is IMO not something you should brag about in systems architecture. And pwsh is different - it has modules which are encapsulated and you don't have to start another instance of shell to prevent mingle. Parallelism ofc still benefits from faster startup.

> I had dozen of such projects in previous decade on Windows and several on Linux and never had any problem with slow startup really.

OK. So then startup time is not slow? Well, then it's of course a non issue - but then I also don't see why a process pool would be required.

> Pattern of usage of bash scripts where hundreds of shell script run every minute is IMO not something you should brag about in systems architecture.

Yet, you just did :) Anyway, it was hardly intended as bragging, rather than just stating facts. Lots of stuff are shell scripts. Lots of user facing commands are wrapped in shell scripts. Of the ~3k commands in my $PATH, around 500 are shell scripts. You may not think this is a good state of affairs, but it's still a fact. (And it's quite unclear to me what's so bad about it - an excellent use for scripts is providing environment for other programs.)

> OK. So then startup time is not slow? Well, then it's of course a non issue

Its not as fast as bash or cmd but I don't start hundreeds of instances of shell

> but then I also don't see why a process pool would be required.

If you have habit of starting shell every ten seconds or so and equally fast close them, I guess powershell will not be your friend. Bad habit to have anyway IMO, because there are few tools that support that workflow.

> Yet, you just did :)

I never said I run bunch of instances of pwsh - I usually run couple only and within them, everything happens. Although pwsh starts in 300ms on my machine.

> And it's quite unclear to me what's so bad about it

The bad about it is jungle of bashizms and next to 90% of statements which have nothing to do with actual business logic but are there for text massage and parsing.

You can't really compare bash and pwsh tho - you have entire dotNet ecosystem there compared to bash where you need jungle of tools. You can do almost ANYTHING in pwsh without relying on external tools. That is consistency - on different flavors of linux, some tools are there, some are not, and some are just different, even the basic ones such as stat. I get nightmares from the fact that grep and sed and awk and perl and rg and whatever each use their own flavor of reg ex... Its just insane :)

pwsh is more comparable to mainstream languages like go or python. What separates it from them is that it is designed for shell. With that power, I can understand a little bit of slower startup time, but I am sure it will be solved eventually.

> Bad habit to have anyway IMO, because there are few tools that support that workflow.

This is absolutely false. Powershell and the Windows console prompt do not support this workflow. Every other shell/terminal emulator combination I can think of supports it fine.

Perhaps you can elaborate on why you consider it to be a "bad" habit?

> cross platform pwsh is just few years old

It's slow on Windows too.

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