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Comment by AndrewGaspar | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking to work with structured, hierarchical data from a CLI, this is where PowerShell really shines. Its OO model is a really excellent fit for Windows, and all of the common utilities in PowerShell are designed around this model. And it solves this problem much more elegantly than trying to massage XML through UNIX-style text processing utilities.

On the one hand, I think it would be interesting to see a truly OO shell for UNIX, but on the other hand I don't know if that's really necessary for a UNIX system.

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Unfortunately in practice I've found powershell hasn't been much of a panacea. You give up all the problems of parsing text, but now have new problems dealing with tools that don't output objects and getting them to do so.

I used powershell for some moderately complex workflow & reporting stuff but at the end was kind of on the fence about if I should have just scrapped it all and done it with traditional tools. It really felt like powershell made hard things easy but easy things hard. I don't think I would use powershell again unless there was absolutely no other choice.

Powershell is nice if you are a sysadmin--it beats the pants off of cmd.exe or clicking around wizards. It's very nice that it has real data structures like arrays and hashmaps, and I found JSON processing to be much better than using bash+jq.

That said, I'm not sure I would ever want to implement much in it other than typical systems automation stuff.

I was all about Powershell, and then a coworker called it a gimped Python. I realized nearly everything I'd ever 'solved' in Powershell was a triviality in Python, and nearly every api and utility that was good in powershell would have been just as well off with a python api. Not to fault Microsoft, it was a huge step forward, but I'd love if they made bindings easy and deprecated, now that they've embraced open source.

Wow that's a great way to describe it. Funny because all the workflow and reporting stuff I've done since then has been in python and has been an absolute joy & breeze to build compared to powershell.

Sadly, deployment of Python (or Ruby, Perl, etc) is horrific pain at scale.

If you are automating a large organization -- Powershell has one massive edge, already deployed and able to be managed sanely via the domain management tools with a permission model around it.

Some large (30k+ machine) organizations actually have fairly decent sized research projects on best ways to automate deployments and system management. It ends up being far trickier than it appears on the surface and any tool blessed by MS and shipped by default has a huge edge. Powershell might not be great -- but it is already on the machine and the competition is batch files.

I find that the more I use powershell the more it makes sense. If you take the time to do things the powershell way and get over the fact that it isn't UNIX, then its insanely productive.

That being said I'm with you on your last statement. Jeff Snover has always said that Windows benefits from PS being OO because its configuration is API oriented. PS brings the kind of consistency to Windows that has typically been available in UNIX.

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