Daniel Keep wrote:
Christopher Wright wrote:
With Powershell, you need to be familiar with the tools for dealing with
System.Data.DataTable or whatever. Maybe it would only take ten minutes.
The most time it could save in that regard is an hour.
The syntax for these commands is so simple, you don't even really need
to learn them.
It's stuff like "get-columns" and "sort-list". I don't think I ever ran
across a powershell command where I couldn't accurately guess it's
purpose. Most of the time, I even got the syntax first try without
needing to check the help.
What's more, it's the SAME set of tools for EVERY kind of object. If it
helps, imagine if in UNIX you could treat any file as a folder of files
containing the parsed contents (each of which may, themselves, be
folders of files.)
You wouldn't need sed or awk for parsing any more because the
environment has already done it for you.
The cost of learning is not a significant factor here. You might have
plenty of other good arguments (and I offered some), but this isn't one
of them.
It took me a year or more to become fluent and comfortable with
scripting in UNIX. I don't think you CAN learn things like sed or grep
straight away because you've got to learn the regex language first (and
they're always bloody different in every different environment.) You
then have to learn how the program works, and which options are actually
useful. And then you need to practice with it.
When I first started using sed, I had to constantly check the man page
because I forgot which options I wanted to use. Same thing with grep (I
only recently started remembering when I needed the -v switch, for
example, and I've been using it for years!)
Powershell's learning curve is practically non-existent. There are no
domain-specific languages; just standard commands with regular, obvious
names that all do one thing really well.
Within about an hour of first seeing powershell in action, I felt
comfortable writing simple scripts to munge data. An hour versus a
year+ with UNIX; that's not something you can simply ignore.
If you're happy with UNIX, then that's fine. But discounting the things
powershell does well is just doing yourself a disservice.
What really saddens me is that, assuming powershell is better, UNIX will
never match it; at least not for a very long time. UNIX has so much
history in its CLI, whereas Windows doesn't. Microsoft can afford to
"reboot" the Windows CLI and start from scratch; UNIX can't.
Then again, Microsoft could just flub the whole thing anyway. :P
-- Daniel
The thing is, I don't *want* my _shell_ to be able to parse anything.
It's a shell, not a framework with everything and two kitchensinks built
in to parse every imaginable file format on my computer. That's the
whole point of the UNIX philosophy: small, encapsulated tools that do
one or a few tasks very well.
So instead of just writing a program that reads text from STDIN or a
file, parses the input and spits something about the file out in another
form of text, I'd have to write, maintain and distribute that exact
program AND an additional .NET "cmdlet". Not only that it's another part
of my software I will have to maintain, it only works on one OS with one
shell. On any UNIX, I can just use it. Compile it, use it. Pretty
straight forward.
When I write a sh script, it will work on a multitude of OSes, no matter
how old or young it might be, no matter what purpose it serves. Granted,
the syntax is a big downside, but you will usually fall back to the
scripting language of your (or your project's) choice anyways at some
point. E.g. the deploy process of Rails applications is not written
using sh. They're simply written in Ruby (as rake/capistrano tasks).
I'm not saying the powershell is a bad thing. The bad thing is that it
doesn't work everywhere. When the powershell was released I couldn't use
it because the Windows I was running was too old. So Microsoft has this
awesome shell that only works on their newest OS. What if I wanted to
automate something on my grandmother's PC with Windows 98? Or for less
suckage, lets say Windows 2000? I can automate processes on *any* UNIX,
as long as it provides a shell and every UNIX I could possibly think of
does that. So the same automation that I made on my opensolaris server
works on my aunt's completely different computer with Linux on it.
.02
Alex
