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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

Powershell is pretty awesome in Windows but it melts a lot of traditional Unix hacker brains from my experience.

You really have to buy into it and that's a hard sell for those who aren't Windows power users.

It is easier to approach it, if instead of trying to see UNIX everywhere, one thinks of the REPL environments from Xerox PARC/ETHZ, or even AmigaDOS with REXX.

Former Windows Admin who still uses Powershell on *nix. Once you get over the hump, you will find it's pretty darn good scripting language. Personally, I find it much more maintainable since verb-noun is clunky while writing but much easier to read.

For me my brain can NOT stop trying to use it as a CMD replacement. The CMD commands just do not work (duh its not CMD!). I then have to have that 'kerthunk' spot where I try to use the newer commands. Nothing wrong with powershell. It is just my brain for some reason can not let go of CMD in this context. Jump to bash no sweat. But for some reason my brain just will not use powershell correctly and I have no idea why. Great scripting lang and way better than bash or CMD script.

If you're doing Windows administration, PowerShell is a must; the Windows GUI is too limiting.

I actually love PowerShell and use it extensively to automate Hyper-V labs, but there's a big difference between automation and one-off things like a checkbox to enable nested virtualization. There's also a large portion of users looking for something just good enough as a desktop GUI to manage just a few VMs with no automation, and Hyper-V Manager is definitely behind when compared to VirtualBox or VMware Workstation in that regard.

As far as I'm convinced, PowerShell isn't a replacement for an interactive shell, it's a Windows-native replacement for Python.

Fair point, but these people probably also don’t administer Hyper-V environments.

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