Comments on You work for me, Computer: PowerShell: condemned to reinvent

Are you kidding? MS couldn't even get the ...

2011-04-04T11:42:51.252-07:00
Are you kidding? MS couldn't even get the simplest thing right. Their "compare-object" is supposed to be their "equivalent" to diff. Not so. Not even close. Try comparing these two files:

file 1:
a
b
c
d

file 2:
d
c
b
a

Unix diff correctly shows how they are different. MS compare-objects says they are the same. Why? Because the latter doesn't care about order.

Microsoft is not "very smart". They are demented.

Piping objects has draw backs too. Here's a ca...

2009-10-23T13:38:17.490-07:00
Piping objects has draw backs too. Here's a case that came up on the internal PowerShell mailing list...

Unix:

cat foo | wc -l

PowerShell:

Get-Content foo | Measure-Object -line

Ignore the line length, as I didn't use any aliases for the PowerShell version. The issue here is that Get-Content returns a String, not a StreamReader. The result is that for large files, the entire String must be read into memory and for really large files, swapped back out to disk!

You could easily work around this with objects; this example is just to show that objects have drawbacks just as byte streams do. Everything is always a balance. I like the Unix approach because it is a simple system with drawbacks that are well understood. I dislike the object approach because it is a complex system with less obvious drawbacks that don't bite you until much later.

Unix is optimized around flat files windows is opt...

2009-10-22T21:04:21.660-07:00
Unix is optimized around flat files windows is optimized around objects. It's not the they don't understand Unix. The Powershell Team has a strong unix Background. It's just just that M$ has 87% market share and a trillion dollars in the bank share that says F@ck unix.

Sorry but no: Pipelining objects is much smarter. ...

2009-10-21T06:21:30.246-07:00
Sorry but no: Pipelining objects is much smarter. You can still pipe strings or binary data if you want, but you don't have all the drawbacks.

And then there's the security implications. While theoratically possible, are all your scripts safe against whitespace|"'` injection? Piping objects is sooo much easier AND it does not kill your system if the bytestream contains `rm -rf /`.

Just my two cents...

I agree, PowerShell is way better than the primiti...

2009-08-20T18:53:37.639-07:00
I agree, PowerShell is way better than the primitive, DOS style Windows CMD. However, it's nothing like a normal Unix shell for me... and I'd rather just use cygwin.

I don't know the history of PowerShell or any of t...

2009-04-20T16:48:00.000-07:00
I don't know the history of PowerShell or any of the team members. I'm sure they are all very smart and have a strong grasp of Unix in general. Maybe they understand exactly what I'm getting at, but explicitly rejected it for some non-obvious reasons (such as scheduling, implementation complexity, target users, etc). They probably know better than I do. My apologies for exaggerating to make a point :-)

I find the 2nd point interesting given that most o...

2009-04-20T16:08:00.000-07:00
I find the 2nd point interesting given that most of the powershell team were unix only guys before this project.