Hacker News Reader

Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

PowerShell took everything that was great about .NET and combined it with everything that was terrible about Bash. So we have, yet again, a difficult to understand language for shell scripting.

View on HN

Why is it bad? I've been able to write some pretty great PS scripts to automate tasks. It's easier than firing up Visual Studio and writing a C# program I'd need to recompile if I ever want to change it.

Have you considered F#? Works well for scripting.

It's very powerful but the syntax is step back 20 years:

    If ($Number -gt 0)

That's just one example. There is a lot of really confusing stuff in powershell that's entirely unnecessary. There were going for some kind of Bash-shell familiarity which, oddly enough, most Windows developers don't even have.

I'd say the usage of -lt and the like is because angle brackets are used for piping data.

The shell is a mess of symbols making any sane programming language impossible. Instead of perhaps rethinking the "mess of symbols" issue they ruined the language instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com