That is where you get it wrong, because the REPL concept as introduced by Smalltalk and Interlisp-D/Lisp Machines it is exactly what Powershell tries to achieve.
UNIX shells are a poor imitation of it.
I never said UNIX invented the REPL concept (though I’d have thought time sharing systems predated LISP machines) and this a conversation about personal preference so there is not right or wrong answers (aside arrogant comments from techies who feel they should belittle others for having differing preferences).
I don’t happen to like Powershell. That doesn’t make me wrong. That literally just means I don’t happen to like Powershell. Period.
(and voting me down for personal preference is really just pathetic)
I am not the one downvoting you, I rather have discussions, even when I might not be right.
> REPL concept
the interactive REPL was introduced by Lisp around 1962 way before Lisp Machines, Smalltalk...
Yes, but not with the capabilities that their graphical sucessors brought into the computing world.
You surely could not display inline structured data and interact with it graphically on an IBM 704 teletype.
Well, you had Lisp structure editors already in the 60s. Doing it graphically doesn't really add too much to it. If you read the manual for BBN Lisp, you can see that it did end 60s / early 70s more than many current systems do - like managing source code, working with images, structure editors for code and data, sophisticated user-level error handling, etc..
That’s the problem with Powershell for me, it’s taken the REPL concept but made it too feature rich and too verbose so you lose the speed of writing the code and simplicity of piping predictable streams of data.
The thing with Linux / UNIX is it’s very command line driven from the outset. So if you wanted to do the function calls from shared libraries et al you could write a wrapper in C, Python, Perl, whatever and still use Bash etc to interface with it. You’re not tied to using Bash to solve all of your problems. Bash just provides a convenient interface for chaining all those tools in other languages together. Now I know the same can be said for command prompts on Windows but for whatever reason that seems to be less common than it is on POSIX.