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
lisbeth f.-c. mulholland
- she/her
- selectric.space/
in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:
no you're right powershell is absolutely nuts and when faced with the option i will try and do things in classic windows cmd as much as i can (usually if i have to write a windows cmd script i am in a very ridiculous situation as it is)
to date i have not one single time encountered a problem i couldn't fix without powershell, and every single time i've been told that the only solution lay in powershell, what I found out is that that didn't work either, and in fact there was no solution.
i can name a single situation where i have ever used powershell and it made any sense, and it was "wrote a timing loop in it because installing python was too many steps," and that was a false economy anyway because it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to fucking write an infinite loop and a sleep statement because powershell sucks big donkey nuts
powershell feels like a bullying sysadmin for an entirely different paradigm of computer system that i do not understand, perhaps even one that cannot be understood at all. some sort of quantum computer BOFH
types name of executable in current location
PS: You forgot the dot slash prefix, you fOOL, YOU ABSOLUTE MORON. NOW TYPE IT AGAIN, CORRECTLY THIS TIME.
god forbid it just go "oh this is an interactive session" and ask what you meant
tbf that's how unix shells work, you don't want . at the start of your path because that allows randos to override commands after you cd, and you don't want . at the end of your path because that lets randos typo-squat on your typos.
yeah but this isn't that. you can get bash for windows if you want that. this is supposed to be "cmd but more" on a platform where typing the name of a program in the cwd is supposed to make it go
the converse is also true. it's cross-platform, you can use powershell on linux. I'm sorry.
i'm still not sure if powershell on linux is more fucked up, or the fact that you can run sshd on windows backed by powershell now
is there a tool that can project windows gui frames into the x server protocol, making it fully windows-native?
two part answer: 1) i don't know but 2) citrix demonstrates that the feature is absolutely doable
real big python "i know what you meant when you typed quit, but for extremely obscure reasons we can't actually make it do what you expect" energy tbh
I feel like it’s a very straightforward reason which is that the repl doesn’t have any special commands at all it just only runs Python code
the obtuseness is somewhere in the interaction of "well, why not just make quit.repr() raise SystemExit?" and "because then that has all kinds of unintended consequences"
yeah it's perfectly justifiable to use like exit(1) in a real script
okay nevermind python should just git gud https://cohost.org/porglezomp/post/1352452-we-can-make-this-pro
oh lovely, that's disgusting, and it passes our import _sitebuiltins; _sitebuiltins.__dict__ edge-case check
us, reading the DOS 5.0 manual, encountering DOSSHELL.EXE: oh, i always thought DOS had one S
Powershell is MS bash like .net is MS java, I for one can't wait to see what they create for MS python
Thanks for giving me something to send next time I get asked to use powershell for something and respond like I was just asked to lick a switch cart.
Hopefully no time soon since I only touch bash and the occasional sh shell now! Thank fuck!
Man I've been using it a bit last week and felt the same. Then I'm like, what fresh hyper verbose hell do I need to do to redirect stderr to stdout? Oh, it's "2>&1". Felt like I got pranked.
a while ago for work i hand-wrote a bash script to automate deploying a certain app onto linux servers, with the initial config required to make it work with our environment. this app also needs to be deployed to windows servers, too, and i know i'll eventually have to repeat this effort for windows with powershell one day. i'm not looking forward to that day.
Ansible has Windows support these days. It bundles a bunch of pre-written PowerShell scripts to copy files, restart services, break the registry, etc. -- very handy if you (a) value your sanity and (b) happen to administer windows servers (despite the inherent contradiction with goal [a])
I've had to write (simple) webpages in vi and whenever I have to open Powershell my skin crawls.
i wrote a few pieces of the Pinput build scripts in it to see what the deal was, and my conclusion is that PowerShell feels like it came from the same parallel universe that gave us IEFBR14