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Comment by tomswartz07 | Hacker News Reader

I find it particularly interesting that they highlighted his work with *Nix systems in his early career.

I don't want to draw any conclusions, but I have a good feeling about that.

I found it interesting they didn't mention anything about his career at MS since being on the NT team in 92.

I think the #1 thing Microsoft needs to do in order to right itself is become a platform that developers love, which isn't the case today. Becoming fully posix compliant would be a great start to that.

They've been there and no one used it.

They abandoned it when they dominated developer mindshare, which they do not today.

Also, I'm not talking about a posix layer that is all but hidden, I'm talking about making Windows a posix system. Coreutils (or something like it), a free compiler, a terminal.

Microsoft already provides "something like" coreutils, free compilers, and a console subsystem. While these things could use considerable improvement — particularly the console subsystem — I'm not sure that the best approach for either Microsoft or the market is to encourage a POSIX/GNU monoculture. I'd rather see Microsoft incorporate good ideas from the competition into future products, and vice versa.

Well sure, I guess my problem is that the current console is terrible, including the powershell.

Console window aside, what do you think of Powershell as a shell/scripting language?

I'd hazard a guess and say that they didn't use it much and only noticed »Whoa, I have to type Get-ChildItem instead of ls? That's so bloated, get me out of here.«

(Side note: I'm a developer, not an administrator and I use PowerShell as such – I have no clue of how to query AD or manage IIS, but I do know the language very well. I also was a technical reviewer of the PowerShell Cookbook 2nd ed.)

From my experience the language has some quirks (that are being slowly remedied in recent versions, e.g. handling of one-element arrays), but otherwise is quite well designed. The quite consistent naming of cmdlets give you enough hints to figure out what a command would be, if you only knows it exists, e.g. querying things always start with Get, projection is done with Select, etc. In a way, PowerShell is more unixy than traditional Unix utilities in that they really do one thing and only one thing. This can lead some to consider PowerShell overly verbose, because the pipeline often looks like

    Get-Things | Select-Things | Format-Things

But to me this is actually nicer because I can concentrate on each part individually and not figure out the switch to ls that tells me the file size. And well, PowerShell passes objects through the pipeline so most of the time you can cut text processing to a minimum because you already get what you need directly (which is not to say that text processing is poor in PowerShell – -match, -replace represent grep and sed and switch -regex is very nice for quickly writing parsers for semi-structured text content).

Thanks! Sounds like I will have to get serious about finding time to get it under my fingers then.

I started out code-golfing Project Euler problems in PowerShell and later noticed that because it's .NET-based it can complement .NET development fairly well. Examples below are all things I did recently.

Need to fiddle around with a format string to get it right?

    '{0:yyyy-MM-dd}' -f (Get-Date)

Or need to quickly test a web service whether the new method works correctly?

    $p = New-WebServiceProxy http://localhost/FooService.svc
    $p.AwesomeMethod()

Or quickly figure out whether a license key matches with the lib you have lying around anyway:

    Add-Type -Path key.dll
    [Key.LicenseKey]::Check('...')

For me it dramatically reduced the number of ConsoleApplication8624 projects in VS. In any case, if there are questions you can also drop me a mail.

Cool, thanks again

IIRC (old Windows NT4 MCSE here) POSIX subsystem never had access to TCPIP, which made it pointless. It was a sales point, rather than a genuinely useful subsystem.

That said, I think OSs are irrelevant: people are happy to pay for apps, cloud hosting etc and MS are happy to provide it to them, Windows or not, for money.

I don't doubt it, it was only Posix.1, required by the Federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem).

Per http://www.unityisplural.com/2012/01/windows-posix-complianc... due to a procurement lawsuit in 1995 the Coast Guard was forced to accept a NT based "open system" bid. I don't know if they actually cared at the time, but the UNIX(TM) losing bidders certainly did, and it certainly made a big difference in subsequent adoption of NT/Windows.

Microsoft acquired Interix in 1999. That was a much more complete POSIX subsystem than the one that originally shipped with NT.

Another lost opportunity. Microsoft could've captured the academic and web-developer market that eventually turned to OS X as a client OS.

What I recall hearing was that wherever the standard allowed a POSIX call to just set errno to indicate "sorry, we don't support this", MS's POSIX compatibility library did so, rendering it useless.

The CLR, .NET and Visual Studio are quite nice, some of the best in the IDE world.

However, it's Microsoft's tendency to squeeze and coerce compliance that drove people away. Proprietary everything means you don't play nice with everyone else.

Now the web has leveled the playing field somewhat, and they can't be coercive to be successful. It'll be interesting to see them play will on other companies' turf and platforms.

Man, a fully functional supported bash-like terminal on Windows would be heaven sent.

I'd take PowerShell over bash any day. If you mean the console window, that's completely independent of the applicating running inside both on Unix-likes and Windows and admittedly there are things to improve. However, there are ConEmu, Console2 and others which by now work really, really well.

Why are all of them column based? You cant arbitrarily resize a console window in 2014?

I use Cmder, which is nice and you can resize arbitrarily (I agree that it's ridiculous not to be able to horizontally resize a console window).

Sure you can! Right click on the console window bar (top) and look in Settings. You will need to increase the horizontal buffer size or something like that.

Right, but that's a considerable inconvenience compared to the usual ways of resizing a window. Also, IIRC, there's no Win32 SIGWINCH equivalent, so full-screen interactive console utilities won't respond correctly to resizing.

While there are reasonable third-party workarounds for the most pressing problems, the Windows console subsystem could use lots of love.

There is equivalent! And many applications know about it. Example? Far Manager, Vim, ... WINDOW_BUFFER_SIZE_EVENT

Why can I resize all other windows by dragging the bottom right but not cmd.exe?

I also forgot to mention how slow text output is on cmd.exe when compared against terminals like xterm on linux. If the new CEO can improve the windows command line experience I for one would be immensely grateful.

Because cmd.exe is a fixed width based on the character count. You can drag the height down but not the width sideways. If you right click on the black C:\ icon in the top left and go to properties, the layout tab will let you set the character count width and in turn change that, or alternatively set the font size which will scale the window to suit the character count at the new font size.

You might have been facetious to prove a point but surprisingly few know you can change those settings there, and I like making my terminal oldschool-hacker-green :)

edit: Actually, I've no idea what I've done but now I can drag the window arbitrarily and it'll just show more characters. Maybe I set a font and now can do it? I don't know!

edit 2: I made it go to 160 characters, then set it back to 80, and now it'll let me drag it out to 160 but no more? This is so confusing Microsoft is on drugs

edit 3: Oh, ok. Screen buffer size sets the 'you can resize to this maximum' whereas screen size sets the 'you start at this size'. I'll stop making edits now.

You can with ConEmu, just drag or snap to any size you want and subsequent commands will fill any available horizontal space

They're not completely independent on Windows. That's why all of the attempts to make a better Windows console ultimately fail.

I'd take bash over PowerShell any day. The whole Windows philosophy makes building stuff out of disconnected smaller parts harder than it needs to be.

Exactly - the beauty of bash is that it's accessible

That is not PS problem but community problem. PowerShell is years ahead of bash. Bash community is decades ahead.

That's ridiculous. PowerShell's #1 selling point, object oriented streams, is only available to .NET languages! Which is why the community will never prosper.

Try fish. It's year ahead of bash and powershell.

It's called MinTTY and comes with Cygwin.

I'd never even consider using a Windows machine without it.

http://lifehacker.com/5185647/mintty-gives-cygwin-a-native-w...

Microsoft supports MinTTY and Cygwin?

/sarcasm

It doesn't have to. That's the beauty of an open software ecosystem.

I use TCC from these guys (jpsoft.com). It used to be called 4NT and before that 4DOS. Basically it's a superset of cmd.exe (a super-dooper-set these days) and lets you do pretty much anything you can do with shells like bash.

If you're from a Unix background, you're probably better off running bash from Cygwin, but if you're a Windows guy, TCC is a great shell.

It's the first thing I install on a Windows machine.

Agree that it is needed. In the meantime, I use M-x eshell in emacs when I have to develop on windows.

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