i detest powershell. i won't discuss this, there's no reason to. i am no threat to powershell, you don't need to defend it, it's obviously never going away so do not interact with this post if you don't hate powershell too, i don't want to hear it. however, every single time i've touched PS it feels like writing with my left hand. it's so indescribably backwards. it's programming but flipped 180 degrees along the vertical axis. my brain won't engage with it. i've been computing my entire life, i have experienced a hundred weird programming environments, from batch files to perl to bash to lua to python to php to asp to visual basic, qbasic, hell, c64 basic, they can be irritating and limited but they make sense. every single piece of powershell i've seen felt like a mix of "voicemail from a relative you've never spoken to who's trying to rope you into a grift" and "guy who you dread asking for help because he's going to go now you see why i keep telling you about $thing_i_never_shut_up_about :)." all powershell documentation has this thick greasy layer of "i know you hate this but i'm going to rub it's theoretical usefulness in your face and you won't be able to say that I'm wrong, just try, just try to prove that it's bad, try to show me where powershell isn't very useful, ha ha, you can't, you can't" powershell feels like a bullying sysadmin
Powershell hits that exact nexus point of "wow what a great idea" and "wow what a baffling execution". Rationalizing shell syntax and integrating it with a wide standard library and more powerful programming paradigms is smart! But it always ends up being the worst of both worlds: things that are simple in other shells are verbose and complex in Powershell, and things that you want from a programming language use baffling shell metaphors instead of just working like C# or whatever.
intellisense for tab completion? hell yeah.
but Get-ChildItem really does not stick in memory like List does.
even with the tab completion.
I only remember Get-ChildItem via the phrase: "listing entries is like stealing candy from a baby"
it's designed for people already waist deep in windows developer metaphors and not like, for you the user to grok.
Let's not forget it was also unusably slow up until at least Win10, and I don't mean that in the usual whiny tech boy "some operations are kinda slow compared to a theoretical spherical cow distro of highly optimized Linux."
I mean unusably slow as in "just getting a fucking prompt to show up could take 10 minutes."
It's only now that it's upgraded to the other thing, where it's almost usable but then yes, actually, cat is not cat, it's actually Get-Item-Text, and there's an accidentally-quadratic string allocation bug that will 'cause it to stall indefinitely if your file is too big.
There's a reason WSL2 exists.
Mind you, PS for Linux also exists, allegedly, but no one has ever installed it, so its reasoning remains a complete mystery.
