It's also way too verbose and slow for 90% of the stuff I'd use Bash for (or would have used Perl in another life)
I often wonder why Microsoft didn't base it on Python, Node, or something else. I can't remember when PS was first released so I'm not sure what would have been ideal at the time.
PowerShell is great because it's a swiss army knife that has a very nice REPL with autocomplete, no weird whitespace behavior, readline[0], and can do anything .NET can do if you need to do anything more complicated.
Plus it's object oriented so you can focus on doing the tasks you actually need to do rather than trying to figure out how to use archaic utilities to parse the text based output of other archaic utilities.
0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadli...
They originally based it loosely on Perl and the Korn shell. In the first edition of "Powershell in Action" by Bruce Payette there is a sidenote that states:
'PowerShell uses the "at" symbol ("@") in a few places, has $_ as a default variable, and uses "&" as the function call operator. These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl. In fact, at one point, we were using Perl as a root language, and these elements stem from the period. Later on, the syntax was changed to align more with C#, but we kept these elements because they worked well. In Perl terminology, they contributed significantly to the "whipupitude quotient" of the language.'
It also states:
'The core PowerShell language is based on the POSIX 1003.2 grammar for the Korn shell. Originally, Perl idioms were appropriated for some of the more advanced concepts such as hash tables. However, as the project progressed, it became clear that aligning PowerShell syntax with C# was more appropriate.'
They probably didn't base it on anything else since they control .NET.
I doubt it's slow because of .NET, it's slow because of either its design or because of under-investment in performance.
However... which version of PS are you using? As far as I remember the newer versions are quite fast.