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Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by mattmanser on Friday March 13, 2020 @07:27PM (#22571753)
Is it widespread? I've never seen anyone else using powershell 'in the wild', admittedly for the last 3 years I've mainly worked alone, but I still see people using CMD scripts.

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

Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by vbezhenar on Friday March 13, 2020 @07:46PM (#22571856)
CMD is the worst language I ever saw. It's full of hacks for simplest tasks. The only reason I'm using it is for old systems where PS is not preinstalled.

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.

Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by mattmanser on Friday March 13, 2020 @09:14PM (#22572315)
For me the big problem is that I know it can do loads, but it's not C#. So between the awkward wait for it to boot, the stupid naming convention, and the knowledge that the whole power of the .net framework should be at my finger tips, but in a really alien and unintuitive way, I prefer to either write a really small bat, or write a small C# console app.

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.

Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by Ididntdothis on Friday March 13, 2020 @07:55PM (#22571896)
"I would love to learn why people think that power shell is ugly, especially comparing with bash. "

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

Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by gerdesj on Friday March 13, 2020 @08:44PM (#22572102)
One criticism I've seen and levied myself is the sheer amount of typing:

[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)

Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by Ididntdothis on Friday March 13, 2020 @08:58PM (#22572194)
Verb-first was also a bad choice. When I type “get” I am getting thousands of suggestions which makes autocompletion pretty useless. There is also no way to find all cmdlets that deal with active directory. It would be much better if I could type “AD” first and then get all cmdlets that deal with active directory.
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by InvaderFizz on Friday March 13, 2020 @09:12PM (#22572305)
Try:

  man *-AD*
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by ygra on Sunday March 15, 2020 @02:42AM (#22581809)
You want Get-Command here, usually, not Get-Help.
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by kuzimoto on Friday March 13, 2020 @09:39PM (#22572441)
I don't think it's that bad. Better than bash where every command has is either something archaic or just what whoever wrote it wanted it to be. It better resembles English than the other way around. Plus you can use "get-command "something`" which gives you everything that contains that string, or search for a certain provider for all commands related to a specific thing.

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

Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by vbezhenar on Saturday March 14, 2020 @07:08AM (#22574462)
Powershell was made to allow launching arbitrary programs with redirections and pipes. That's why some language choices were made and that's why I'm interested in comparison with bash.
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by toyg on Friday March 13, 2020 @07:35PM (#22571798)
sysadmins who are fully invested in the MS ecosystem do use it a lot. People doing cross-platform work, don’t.

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.

Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by zozbot234 on Friday March 13, 2020 @09:27PM (#22572390)
PowerShell is cross-platform these days.
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by nbevans on Saturday March 14, 2020 @06:44AM (#22574397)
I don't believe PowerShell was 'acquired' - it was built in house. I can recall reading the MSDN blog posts about its development way back when.
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by fortran77 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @12:08AM (#22573111)
I probably write a few lines of Powerhshell every day. All my automation is done in Powershell, including bringing up new Amazon AWS instances, etc.
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by Ididntdothis on Friday March 13, 2020 @07:33PM (#22571788)
It’s pretty widespread if you have to do sysadmin scripting. There are a lot of useful cmdlets. I am embarrassed to admit that I also run it on my Mac with good success.
Re:Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic by PascLeRasc on Friday March 13, 2020 @07:33PM (#22571791)
bash out

Freudian slip?