I'm not talking about its unorthodox syntax - that's the least of its problems. The language is hellishly inconsistent and has an inexcusable number of legacy issues for being so young.

And the quality of the standard library is poor. More and more often I find I have to drop down into .net commands to work around showstopper bugs in their PowerShell wrappers.

myfunc -param1 this -param2 that

instead of:

myfunc(param1: this, param2: that);

I get the impression it's designed with the intent that you're supposed to type the dash, then hit Tab to get tab-completion in most cases. Same with the verb/noun syntax (I know I want to 'Get' something, so typing Get-<Tab> for the list of things is usually the thing to do). I do find it a bit difficult sometimes to think of an approprioate verb right off the top of my head (is it Get- or New- that I need?).

I'd also love to see the concept of proper namespaces in PowerShell; it seems really inconsistent right now (unless I've missed something). For example, type Show-Command and hit ENTER, then look at the different modules that are available. Some will express a 'namespace' by having it prepended to the noun (see for example, commands from the BitLocker module, their nouns all start with BitLocker) while others express no namespace at all (see for example commands from the 'Dism' module). For everyday use I've gone with the 'add the name to the noun' approach in my own scripts. That does mean I tend to use short namespace names though.

I've mentioned this in an older PowerShell-related thread here - MenuComplete is absolutely awesome and improves the PowerShell experience in the console. I actually think it should be the default. If you havent already, try these commands:

Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -key Tab -Function MenuComplete

Set-PSReadLineOption -ShowToolTips

PowerShell is my full-time shell in Windows now (and it will be in Linux also when I get back into it); I rarely use CMD for anything and parsing text in bash just seems antiquated.

I use fish as my command line, but I still write scripts in bash, even personal ones I only expect to use on my own machine. Just out of a vague sense that I might reuse it, or it might escape confinement, or something.

It seems like it might make some kind of sense, since it doesn't output directly to the console but rather to a pipe. Bash functions sort of work the same way since they don't have complex return values (aside from exit codes) other than the function's output stream.

Take the following in PowerShell:

ls | sort DateTime -d

ls returns an array of objects, sort then sorts the array by each object’s DateTime field (and here I’m asking it to sort in descending order with -d). The point is that sort isn’t depending on any text output, so it works with any array of objects regardless of the command that returned them.

The other cool thing this enables is auto-complete awareness in the shell. If I typed:

ls | sort <Tab>

then the shell knows what makes sense in auto-completion here as ls has an actual return type and in this case it will give me a list of available fields that I can sort on.

For those unfamiliar: ls and sort here are shortened aliases to more wordy verb-noun commands. These (as well as a large bunch of others) are given to you by default.

Structured data with direct access to any OS API, regardless how it is provided, .NET, COM or straight C like DLL.

UNIX world never had that, beyond trying to fit language repls as user shell, which on UNIX always feels like a leaky abstraction.

But just so you are aware you can use the 'class' modifier To change this behavior.

It is one of the most fundamentally bizarre language design choices I have seen in my career

I usually get frustrated with it and bash out a quick cmdlet instead.

I used PS to write small scripts and I actually like it. I'm more fluent with bash, but that's only because I used bash a lot. PowerShell feels more robust, no silly space-in-filename problems, no silly parsing of text output to access fields. May be it's ugly for big scripts, I don't know, for me it looked like a vastly superior version of shell.

I would love to learn why people think that power shell is ugly, especially comparing with bash.

And so I never become comfortable with it, even though I've tried several times since it was released.

The newer IDE is pretty good too.

But C# shows what it could have been if they'd had a talented language designer do it (which no-one can determine if someone is beforehand I admit).

I just wish they'd admit defeat and just use a subset of C# instead of stubbornly sticking with something that seems fairly widely loathed.

I don't think people compare it with bash, but with more modern languages.

[PS] C:\> Get-MyReallyLongFunctionName -Server furtle

$ lol --floop

PS is fine but it takes ages for the bloody thing to wake up and notice command completion. It is like dealing with a teenager in bed.

Actually, I have no problems with PS but with MS's idea of search as deployed to users.

(I run KDE on Arch. Search is faster than I can blink)

  man *-AD*

Autocompletion still works, just type first letter or two after get and filter most stuff out.

In terms of wider adoption, it suffered by maturing at a time when a lot of people had moved on to more powerful devop solutions. And of course, being MS tech (although technically it was acquired), it carries a stigma.

I just found it un-intuitive, ugly, and verbose. Compared to my beloved python it looks really really bad.

Freudian slip?