JeffreySnover

Our goal is to be incapable of sustained error. :-)

Jeffrey Snover[MSFT]

That is not quite right. At the end of the day it is all about automation. But we took the position that the way Admins automate is by scripting the things that they do in an interactive shell. Bruce Payette had a great way of saying it - he said that the lifecycle of 99% of scripts starts at the prompt and ends at the carriage return. Then, somethings you want to codify things so you put it into a script. Then as the function becomes more used and more important, you want to make it more and more formal without having to throw everything away and start with a new language.

So YES and interactive shell is important but it is important as a stepping stone to automation.

That is the PowerShell mindset. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

For the record - the PowerShell team loves Bash and much of PowerShell is modelled after it. To be fair - we also modelled portions after VMS DCL, Perl, TCL and AS400 CL. There are lots of awesome engineers out there working on different platforms and we learned a lot from of them. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

I know the problem you are talking about - it has bitten all of us.

The new language mode you use when writing classes in PowerShell shifts the needle more towards programming semantics than shell semantics and addresses this.

Give it a try!

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

It is just another tool in the toolchest. As you know, on Linux, there are tons of great interactive shells and it is sortof a lifestyle choice. You might want to kick the tires and see whether it fits your lifestyle or not. If you use Bash as your shell, think of PowerShell as you would python or perl - something you write scripts in and call from Bash.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

We did a lot of work on PowerShell startup in this next release - I think you'll be happy.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]