I don't see a tremendous amount of accumulated wisdom in Powershell. It may be newer, but I'm not sure they looked at prior art or had design members who were shell gurus in any other shell than `cmd.exe`, which is a horrific shell. Why are commands horrendously long in powershell? If you spend time in the shell, you don't want your fingers falling off due to overuse. Aside... one of the design decisions Microsoft took that absolutely blows my mind is using `\` for file hierarchies instead of `/` when you're writing an operating system in C!

There are lots of aliases for cmdlets for exactly this reason - interactive use. The verbose commands are useful when reading a script that isn't working at 3am in the morning when your boss is breathing down your neck to fix it "stat!".

RE - your aside '\' vs '/' - I think most of us still shake our head at that decision.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

I don't know if that was really a "decision" or an unfortunate compromise. DOS inherited /foo style command line parameters from CP/M, and DOS 1 didn't have a hierarchical file system, so there was no conflict with the path delimiter character UNIX was using. When DOS 2 introduced directories (and brought over the cd, md, rd, etc. commands from UNIX) suddenly we had to choose between massively breaking backwards compatibility or using something else, like \, as a delimiter.

> Aside... one of the design decisions Microsoft took that absolutely blows my mind is using `\` for file hierarchies instead of `/`

That decision goes back to MS-DOS 2.11, circa 1983. (DOS 1.0 didn't have subdirectories.) The model for DOS directories came from UNIX, which at that time was the very aggressively defended intellectual property of AT&T. As Microsoft was an AT&T licensee -- for Xenix, their version of AT&T System 7 UNIX, which was Microsoft's vision of the future of operating systems when PCs became powerful enough: they licensed it in 1978 and resold it via OEMs -- I speculate that they were afraid that AT&T might sue them for patent or copyright violation relating to the filesystem design if they went with a forward slash.

They used \ for directories because most DOS programs used / for switches.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/06/24/wh...

Interesting hypothesis! I'll ask Bill the next time I see him.

Jeffrey Snover[MSFT]

I'll take his word for it. (If he remembers trivia like that a third of a century later ...)

Well, he made that goddamned donkey game...

> using `\` for file hierarchies instead of `/`

You know you can use both since like XP, right? You can even mix them up in one path which can look quite confusing c:/windows\system32/etc/drivers\

`/` is not a first class citizen. You encounter different oddities throughout the windows environment in the shell and external utilities when you use `/`.

There are many (*nix-inspired) aliases for frequently used commands though. I think PowerShell's preference for verbosity is a strength more than a deficit. Why "grep" when select-string "sls" is so much more intuitive and promotes readability.

The bash I'm running is actually 3 years old. You make it sound like bash was written 27 ago and no one has touched it since then.

Secondly, what constitutes an improvement is a matter of opinion. For example, I don't see this Powersell as an improvement at all.

Autocomplete in Bash was actually a revolutionary improvement

And autocomplete in PowerShell is again.

Cmdlets tell the shell their parameters, and their parameters are long names, so you can just tab through them to find a) the available parameters and b) the ones which might help you.

Well, it's not an improvement, it's just a different design-choice. I for example much prefer Bash's way of doing it.

Also, Bash does have a way of doing it the Powershell-way, if you want that, as others have commented.

Which is also why I disagree with your statement. Bash may be old, but neither the underlying technology nor the use-case changed much in that time. So, there is not a whole lot where you can innovate with a new tool, at least not for such basic tasks, and instead, Bash has matured throughout 27 years to perfectly fit that underlying technology and use-case that millions of people have.