Powershell has some pitfalls of its own (I still much prefer it to Bash despite these):

  1. Dynamic scoping
  2. Squashing lists of size 0 to nulls and 
     size 1 to single elements when they come out of pipes.
  3. Incomprehensible API for XML handling.

On the other hand, when a Powershell program starts getting too big, it's pretty trivial to port parts of it to one of the other .NET languages.

> 3. Incomprehensible API for XML handling.

If you think Scala has a better API for XML handling then you're in for a surprise...

Very true pitfalls, and there are other ones like any non-captured value anywhere in a function becomes the output of the function.

Powershell is exactly what bash should be (and this person wants). Their time would have better spent using and improving the pash project (open source Powershell on Mono): https://github.com/Pash-Project/Pash

Powershell is primarily a repl to a homogeneous .NET-based set of tools, which doesn't describe Unix very well. If you want a type-safe repl that interacts with all the handy tools written for the text-stream-only Unix world you're going to have to do some interpretation.