Re:Windows Subsystem for Linux is good, but not enough yet
by WalterGR on Saturday October 14, 2017 @03:25PM
(#15473742)
I was under the impression that, at least before powershell, the ability to compose programs and form scripts was super limiting
Do you mean using batch files in cmd.exe? Sure.
But that's not really what cmd.exe "was for." It's what WSH - Windows Scripting Host[0] - was for.
A lot of people (perhaps those who have little Windows experience) don't realize this and think that Windows was entirely un-administratable without using the GUI. While that may indeed have been the case (and may still be) for certain tasks, you could get far with WSH. And using real (well, non-shell script) programming languages: WSH was a host on which programming languages could be added. Such as perl, for example. Or Python.
However, there are alternative ways of doing this that seem quite powerful, like the lisp machine—it didn’t fail because it couldn’t handle tackling abstract problems, it failed because unix ended up doing it cheaper and faster. There might even be arguments for visual shell scripting.
That said, if you’re doing anything like unix, you might as well go full unix :)