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Comment by 3eb7988a1663 | Hacker News Reader

I have only ever used Powershell when I had no other options, but a decent number of the APIs feel designed by someone who has never used a terminal. Like they were begrudgingly fulfilling the objective without ever imagining a real use-case.

Naturally, I cannot produce an example off hand, but I was pretty disappointed the last time I had to reach for it and found that a few "obvious" workflows seemed more hacky than I would have expected for a clean-slate terminal language design.

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PowerShell always felt like it's optimized for scripting rather than interactive CLI/REPL use. It's great when the complexity of what you do warrants writing a script that can be debugged, tested, and reused... but then there are better scripting languages. What is good for REPL ergonomics of one-liner juggling is usually bad for scripting and readability, and vice versa. Can't design for both.

Calculators had the same problem when they got too powerful for their own good and feature creep made them outgrow their use case in the world of personal computers (see TI or modern advanced calculator apps like Qualculate). They're pretty awkward compared to HPs that were designed for expressing a simple problem in fewest keystrokes with great attention to detail like interactive inversion and repetition.

I'm sure there are uglier incantations, but I recently discovered this is the correct way to run a traceroute in powershell

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName dns.google -TraceRoute

I got cobol fingers reading that

A common PowerShell complaint, personally I find PowerShell usually takes less keystrokes because the tab completion is flawless.

Hardly makes sense as complaint when nowadays folks are writing book sized prompts to AI agents.

Book sized prompts are equally poor for interactive use, they're typically reused and iterated upon. They're more like scripts than commands.

So a markdown file then, still much more letters than a common COBOL source file.

And you are wrong, who says that is the correct way. The correct way is the one that works

    tnc dns.google -t

I didn't even have to look for the alias, there is standard naming for them.

Like I said before, people who complain just didn't RTFM and got out of their comfort zone.

From what I get, the Designer hated Bash specifically. (As some1 who had 2 use it, can related) The syntax confusing, clunky & slow. Said guy then proceeds to build a Shell which is even slower, the Syntax more convoluted than anything else

Its good to hate bash specifically. The language is so terrible, low on standards, bad discovery. The only good thing about bash is it is pre installed. Its not far away from batch (.bat).

What do you compare it with? Because bash is just terrible.

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