With PowerShell level of slowness it starts to matter. Even very basic commands seem to sometimes take many seconds to run. In the middle of intense workflow it becomes a problem.

What could a shell possibly do so that a basic command would take many seconds?

Currently, "many seconds" is enough time to run an interpreter on the command, connect to a remote machine in Iceland, spin up a new virtual server there, send the command there to be executed, review the execution results for possible exceptions, run a malware scan, fetch the response back, execute the command again on your computer, translate the command and results to Klingon, send them to NSA for archiving, play a quick game of chess with another instance of the shell, and play a congratulatory tune.

Seriously, computers nowadays are fast enough to run a partial compile of your code at every single keystroke while you're writing it. It takes special effort to make a scripting language unusably slow - even an unoptimized interpreter that itself runs on a different interpreter should do just fine.

Care to give examples? I know that the language isn't fast, but afaik nearly all shells are interpreted. There have been performance problems with break/continue in earlier versions as they were implemented using exceptions internally. But that doesn't really qualify as "basic commands", I guess. Cmdlets should be not much slower than running the equivalent C# code yourself.

Hmm, I can't seem to reproduce many such issues with this machine, except Get-Help the first time I tried it. I think it could be that the cmdlets are only slow on the first run (enough to leave me with a bad experience), or the SSD on my PC masks the problem. It's good to know that it's not always super slow.

If it's slow on the first run, then it might be loading a large interpreter from disk. If so, MS might have let the interpreter get a bit ungainly -- you might argue.

I would like to see some examples as well. The only time I've seen performance issues is with third party commandlets (or very lean hosts).

If its part of your build system, then it matters.

I use Powershell for many administrative tasks at work, and it can be annoying if querying data from a single machine takes 5+ minutes. Which it does sometimes.