We have just had the 30th anniversary of someone acting upon that very thought.

> Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts.

-- Larry Wall, perl 1.0 release announcement, comp.sources.unix v13i001, 1988-01-02.

I’d vote for PowerShell in a heartbeat. It passes real objects instead of strings. It’s cross platform and open source. It’s imperative but borrows some functional concepts.

PowerShell is good. I don't like some of the hardened conventions .. but it's highly convenient without being a mess. Nice output, regular sort/filter functions. I like sed but it goes old quickly.

I really wonder if PowerShell wouldn't have been much bigger had it been cross-platform from the start. Definitely better late than never (:clap: Microsoft) but at least in my sphere we never even thought seriously about PowerShell because we had too many linux machines in our environment.

As I say in the talk (and get a big laugh) 'Powershell is boring. It's too well-designed.'

The title 'bash is awesome' was explicitly _not_ what I wanted it to be called. If you watch the talk you'll see what I meant.