7 ms·
I thought this was quite amusing when I read it back in the late 90's. At one point their proposed shell was called "Monad". I wondered "Why do they want to d
by rawdisk 11y ago
I thought this was quite amusing when I read it back in the late 90's. At one point their proposed shell was called "Monad". I wondered "Why do they want to do this?"
I have gone to a number of conferences with MS employees over the years, especially MS lawyers, and with respect to software, they often seem like they have been indoctrinated into a cult. As if the existence of software outside of MS Windows does not exist and as if MS holds the key to solving all problems. But MS does not offer solutions. They create problems (e.g., for anyone who has to deal with their licensing) and then offer "solutions" to the problems they created. It is like someone who proposes to "simplify" something by introducing more complexity.
The idea of MS embracing a proper shell seemed laughable to me. Windows users expect pointing and clicking (and today they want to be able to touch the screen).
Now fast forward to 2015 and it seems like PowerShell has a significant number of users. I am sure it is helping Windows users greatly. Good for them.
But I still think it is laughable. The name still makes me laugh.
I'd rather use something like Back Orifice (which has a simple UNIX client) to control Windows from a proper shell on a computer running UNIX. Or SSH via Cygwin. Or even SUA which has ksh and tcsh. Alas no simple Bourne shell (better for writing portable scripts).
- malkia 11y agoRumor has it, that a somewhat big bank, somewhere in Europe used batch files to drive it's business back in the day...
- Natsu 11y agoThere was once a time when I as a junior employee was left to create a backup system out of shared drives on the Novell server, XCOPY and AUTOEXEC.BAT. It worked better than one might expect. You'd get emails about failed backups (backup flag files removed after a successful backup), backups were versioned, and restore was quick & easy (execute a simple script from the shared drive, then sys c: from a boot disk).
- dkarapetyan 11y agoYou should try powershell. It's actually pretty good and is much better than unix shells.
- KnightHawk3 11y agoIt's petty but I can't get over the case sensitive command names with capital letters in it. They are honestly too long.
- oblio 11y agoIt has aliases for 90% of those commands, though.
- AndrewGaspar 11y agoPowerShell is not case sensitive.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoIt might be better than Bourne or C-derived shells, but I have a hard time conceding it beats for instance Inferno shell, es or rc.
- kbenson 11y agoI know enough and have had enough tangential contact with PowerShell to know that it works on a fundamentally different paradigm, as it does not pipe text, but objects. As such, it's hard to say it's "better" since it's so different. I would hazard that it's better some respects for some things, and the reverse is true as well. It fits well into windows, but would not fit well into UNIX systems, where most things are already just text. I haven't used inforno-shell, es or rc, so can't comment on them directly. That said, if they are easily comparable to bash, ksh, etc, then you probably owe it to yourself to see what powershell is about and why it's fundamentally different.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago