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Better IDE support would also help here, if it could annotate what each flag meant for example and provide inline help and autocompletion. The nice thing about shell is the commands are very short and easy to type on the command prompt, PS is too verbose and is cumbersome for that use case and more full featured languages have all the upsides plus better tooling.

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Powershell has abbreviations (aliases) for common commands and fantastic autocompletion for flags and arguments passed to cmdlets. Where-Object|Format-Table is just ?|ft for example.

Also remember that in PowerShell there's very little munging - half of any serious shell script is sed/cut/awk/tr and so on to munge the output of one command into the input of the next. That more than makes up for PowerShell's individual commands or cmdlets having more characters in.

Bash doesn't even have a definite grammar. What are you going to provide intellisense on?

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