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Comment by iamelgringo | Hacker News Reader

Differences between PowerShell and other *nix shell variants are that PShell allows you to pipe full COM or .NET objects between processes or commends, rather than just piping the text files between different commands.

PowerShell vs cmd.exe PowerShell is actually a complete shell scripting language, that gives you full access to all of the .NET libraries and methods. It also has a rather nice IDE that ships with Windows as is. Also, you can use PShell of Exchange and other server automation, you can do remote scripting, and it has some pretty decent security controls baked into the system.

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> PShell allows you to pipe full COM or .NET objects between processes or commends, rather than just piping the text files between different commands.

Which is IMHO the best part about unix shell and the worst about PowerShell: being pure text, unix shell allows for very loose definition of the interface between the program and outside, allowing to connect stuff in creative ways with minimal plumbing; whereas PowerShell makes this interface definition quite stringent by comparison, hence needing theoretically less plumbing (at least for simple tasks) but requiring far more design in the interface, restricting connectivity which in turns generates more mediation and plumbing to connect foreign elements.

In short unix shell may seem archaic but its loose binding makes it very powerful and quick to solve problems, while PowerShell is, well, a chore.

I haven't used PowerShell (since I don't use Windows), but when using the Unix shell interactively every so often I find myself in a situation where the data is too complex for a shell command to be able to process it, or else running into some corner case of missing functionality. Usually I end up piping into python -c, but that ends up pretty gross... if PowerShell isn't the answer, what is?

I wonder how far you could get by sort of plopping PowerShell onto the Unix shell and supporting both structured and text data.

(Incidentally, one such corner case is summing a list of numbers - this sounds like it should be a short command, but actually requires a complicated command line using awk.)

Complete yes, but slow to start up (takes hundredths of ms, even if hot-loaded), and not very syntax friendly.

Hundredths of ms sounds pretty fast

Yes, it's okay if it's started once, but if you have to run it over and over then it's not. For example run it 10000 times, and if time it takes 300ms - you are looking at an hour of execution. Some apps (even if they are big) are just naturally cached by the OS in the file system buffers, but others are doing quite of other things before running.

If this is going to be a "shell" replacement it needs to start very fast at least in hot mode (cached).

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