Powershell, though. I don't know how you could even document powershell. It's insane.
Does anyone know if there’s any sort of reflective documentation or anything in powershell? Like, is there a way to ask it what arguments exist for a command?
Also just FYI, it can fuzzy match on arguments, so you can specify only the first letter, or substring of the whole name. I think from this aspect, it is far superior to the UNIX tools.
Sometimes I write the same script as PS and as bash script. For PS I usually need 3x more characters than for bash.
There are some features though that are really useful. But most of the time you won’t know about them when you need them.
That's your mistake! Don't write bash scripts in PowerShell, and don't write PowerShell scripts in bash. Don't be surprised if the shopkeeper can't understand you, when you're speaking "French" by translating an English sentence word for word.
PowerShell is much more readable, terse, and elegant than Bash. It absolutely blows it out of the water... on Windows, where its inputs are the streams of objects that it's designed for. If you're trying to shoehorn text-based streams like in Linux into a PowerShell script, you're going to have a bad time.
See this earlier comment I made and the linked comments for some examples of PowerShell-vs-Bash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423650
A sterling example of PowerShell's inanity is its brain-dead, ivory tower implementation of function return values. Anything that outputs to stdout gets added to the return value object for your function. Forgetting for a moment how non-standard and unexpected this is, consider that it’s impossible to completely silence many, many Windows commands CLI programs and utilities. Even with all the silent flags, output redirection, etc. it is simply impossible to silence stdout. What you end up with is... you just can't ever use return values in functions since it's so unreliable. This, coupled with PowerShell's atrocious performance (it's the worst performing scripting language I've used by far) instantly makes PowerShell a second class language for anything apart from very small scripts.
I've never heard anyone call PowerShell “terse” until today. It is currently winning the competition with Java for “Language whose inventor is most likely paid per keystroke”. PowerShell's arguments are extremely verbose and lines tend to become quite long as a result.
Disclaimer: I’m a recovering Windows Admin and haven't used PowerShell in a few years. I'm told that none of these problems have been fixed, but I don't know for a fact.
This is most obviously noticeable (to me at least), when debating ergonomics with people that prefer UNIX platforms, especially bash and text-based configurations. There was a study that showed that an action like moving a mouse to select a file feels slow because there's one slow movement, but selecting the file through typing at a console is perceived to be faster because there are many keystrokes in quick succession. People report that they prefer the latter for "the speed" even if it's an order of magnitude slower than the mouse if measured with a stopwatch.
The terse two-character commands of the UNIX world were an optimisation for teletype. As in a literal typewriter banging away on paper, at a rate of something like 10-30 cps. Modern (four-decade-old!) computers have tab complete, which makes this largely irrelevant.
Verbose commands are an enabler. They enable novice users to read scripts, instead of only masters being able to write them. Long, systematically and consistently named commands enable discovery through wildcard searches.
You cannot now -- nor ever will be able to -- do something like this in the Bash world:
Get-Command Get-Az*Disk*
It's a clever hack around byte streams that people have slowly built up over decades, evolving over time haphazardly. There was an 'sh' for example!
PS: You talk about using Python instead of scripting languages, which is actually a fine choice that I won't argue with. But have you considered writing "heavyweight" PowerShell modules in C#? As in, a proper DLL module? It's mindblowing how productive it is compared to trying to write a command line tool in C/C++, or any other language for that matter. Automatic input validation, input parameter name tab-complete, pipeline handling, all wired up with a handful of attributes...
For short scripts, this works great and improves discoverability for newcomers. This is the siren's song of PowerShell. However, the long commands and particularly the often unneeded/overly verbose parameters frequently creates a wall of text. This really hurts readability for everyone in all but the shortest scripts. Additionally, this wall-of-text that is all to common in PowerShell scripts is very intimidating to newcomers.
Regarding Tab completion in PowerShell, it frequently isn't terribly helpful. To work yourself up to something like Get-ItemPropertyValue is quite an incantation to remember, while being worse than a lot of bash ergonomics.
> have you considered writing "heavyweight" PowerShell modules in C#?
That is an interesting approach and would make life more bearable in MS-only shops. However, I can do the same thing with Python, which is superior to PS in so many ways and doesn't suffer any huge, glaring flaws (as PS does).
Filter is harder than it should be[0]. Same thing for map
[0]: https://www.concurrency.com/blog/august-2018/powershell-basi...