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Comment by uxp8u61q | Hacker News Reader

> "hey, let's extend the functionality of literally every *nix command". Which is hard to achieve.

It's pretty much what powershell did, though.

It sounds like there needs to be a monolithic solution built from the ground up for interoperation.

Updating coreutils is a losing game at this point. Of course people will get angry when a well designed solution gradually takes over simply, because it is better.

What would I use PowerShell to do, though? Most of Windows is a GUI.

That's a key problem with the developer story on Windows, especially coming from GNU/Linux. Where are my standard compilers and libraries? What use do I have for a terminal on Windows? In bash, I get powerful commands and a simple text-based pipeline hooked up to coreutils and literally anything else that runs on the command line, which is a metric ton of software in that ecosystem.

Back to Windows. What would I want PowerShell to do? What would I use PowerShell for that I wouldn't want to just use Bash instead? Windows doesn't have coreutils or nice command line software to do fun or powerful things with.

I see PowerShell as a "look we have a terminal!" from Windows, but nothing that I want to do in said terminal to motivate me to learn.

> Windows doesn't have coreutils or nice command line software to do fun or powerful things with.

Sounds like you've never actually used windows for real tech stuff...

What 'real tech stuff'? Windows is an OS for consumers, not makers.

Eh, not really. Powershell itself is fairly limited in terms of functionality. It's basically one step removed from a .Net REPL, and the .Net classes aren't necessarily written to do *nix admin tasks. It gives you all of .Net to build tools with, but sometimes you still run into Microsoftisms that are total nonsense. There's a reason every C# project was using Newtonsoft's JSON.Net instead of the wonky custom data representations that MS was trying to push left over from the embrace/extend/extinguish era.

I see a lot of buzzwords and attacks in this comment but nothing actually concrete.

If you think .Net is the best way to interact with a *nix environment for administration, by all means go ahead. I think you'll have a lot of fun discovering the problems with it. Lie most tasks involve a pipeline of native commands. Well, if you want a Powershell command in the middle, that means you have to run a native command, marshall the output to an object, do the Powershell commands, then serialize that output back into characters, and then output to a native command. And you potentially have to deal with Powershell thinking in UTF-16 and *nix thinking in UTF-8.

However this is social media, not an academic paper, and you didn't put much effort into backing your claims, either.

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