Re:The Rule of Silence (2006)
by emodendroket on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @09:19AM
(#13166905)
The Windows way of working is only "self-evidently" horrible if you're used to the Unix way of doing things. There are real defects that are legacy baggage (running as admin by default is not good, the registry probably shouldn't be a single database or at least should have better segregation between apps) but having a UI and having real objects in the shell isn't one of them. And I hardly think the registry and PowerShell, which came out nowhere near the same time, were conceived of at the same time.
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> And I hardly think the registry and PowerShell, which came out nowhere near the same time, were conceived of at the same time.
I believe that the registry, in a way, caused PowerShell.
PowerShell works the way it does because Windows is structured data all the way down. A text-based shell a-la bash would not be very useful for Windows sysadmins. If you want to do Windows automation (e.g. on a cluster of windows servers or whatnot), you need to process and manipulate structured data (server settings, user permissions, AD groups, whatever). Hence, a shell and scripting language for doing just that.
If Microsoft hadn't moved from .ini files to the registry between Windows 3.1 and 95, I don't think PowerShell would've had the same design goals as it does now.
Re:The Rule of Silence (2006)
by emodendroket on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @04:40PM
(#13171334)
Perhaps, but PowerShell wouldn't look the way it does without the CLR being ready to hook into either. And I could easily see just having applications that interact with the structured data but return text -- that's what all the old stuff did.
Re:The Rule of Silence (2006)
by numbsafari on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @09:35AM
(#13167015)
S/PowerShell/Windows Scripting Host/ ... which was later than the registry, but not much.
Re:The Rule of Silence (2006)
by emodendroket on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @09:42AM
(#13167067)
I'd say PowerShell and the WSH are fairly different but I've worked very little with the latter.