PowerShell is Microsoft’s latest open source release, coming to Linux, OS X
"Microsoft today released its PowerShell scripting language and command-line shell as open source. The project joins .NET and the Chakra JavaScript engine as an MIT-licensed open source project hosted on GitHub."
-- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/powershell-is-microsof...
Cheers, Peter
On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 12:03:09 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/powershell-is-microsof...
One of the commenters on the Phoronix item http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-PowerShell-On-Linux helpfully linked this https://mohd-akram.github.io/2013/05/16/a-python-developers-guide-to-powershell “Python Developer’s Guide to PowerShell”.
Looking at it, I see something that is trying to be both a shell language and a programming language.
In a shell language, you normally want the words you type to be taken literally. Which means you need a special notation for substituting variable and expression values, e.g. the various forms of “$” prefix in Bash and other common shells.
In a programming language, it’s the other way round: anything you want to be taken literally, you put in quotation marks. Everything else is interpreted as variables, expressions, keywords etc.
This also means that shell languages are suited to writing shorter, simpler scripts; for anything more complex, a programming language is better. This is because having to use special shell-style prefixes in a programming language just makes for clutter and detracts from readability.
PowerShell, in trying to be both, ends up being suited for neither.
Well, that didn’t take long...
Microsoft has added “wget” and “curl” commands to PowerShell. Trouble is, they don’t work like the URL-retrieval programs of the same names as commonly found on Linux systems. Someone has raised an issue on GitHub proposing getting rid of these command aliases, to avoid clashes with genuine implementations of these commands. But Microsoft has refused, on the grounds that it would break existing scripts.
participants (2)
-
Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann