9 ms·

Why I develop on Windows

120 points by shortrounddev 3y ago

hesdeadjim 3y ago
After 8 years on macOS, I was forced into developing on Windows back in 2015 when I was making a VR game. WSL1 hit at exactly that time and once I suffered through setting up the environment on ConEmu (Windows Terminal nowadays is wonderful), I never looked back.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thomasjb 3y ago
I keep on seeing all this talk about Powershell, and it's inspiring me to maybe learn some, although I've already commenced pursuit of skill in bash and python
- causality0 3y ago
  Telling ChatGPT to write you a powershell script and then explain what every part of it does makes learning it really fast. It's super handy. Powershell scripts have solved so many time consuming problems for me, like having one-click shortcuts for changing my desktop resolution or fixing all the file names in a 20TB media archive.
- newprint 3y ago
  After 3 decades working on Windows, I recently got into Linux and stared learning bash through "The Linux Command Line, 5th ed." book and watching youtube videos. Powershell is so much nicer and a lot more productive to work with compared to bash. Unlike the bash commands that returns strings, Powershell commands return objects. Working in any OOP language and Powershell feels very natural.
  - cyberbanjo 3y ago
    Just to corroborate from the opposite direction, I have run exclusively Linux on my personal machines for nearly a decade, and I started a new job where I get to use PowerShell, and it's really amazing, the amount of grep/tail/head (or Get-ChildItem/Select -First/-Last) I have to do is so much less, it feels so much less klunky. Probably the only thing I don't like more so far is Get-Help, because it doesnt put you into a pager with search, it just dumps to text. EDIT: apparently I need Help not Get-Help for paging EDIT2: and I hate that PowerShell doesn't support readline/emacs keybindings
    - peteri 3y ago
      I thought the PSReadline module had some of that but then it might be a "nearly" compatible experience which can be really jarring when you hit the edge cases.
      - cyberbanjo 3y ago
        Maybe I just didn't have enabled, thanks for reminding me, seems good enough for me
  - 0x445442 3y ago
    What’s the dirs -v, pushd and popd equivalent in PS?
    - shortrounddev 3y ago
      What do those do
      - metaltyphoon 3y ago
        Keep a stack of dirs where u can jump very quickly into.
    - cyberbanjo 3y ago
      popd and pushd are aliases for Pop-Location and Push-Location, so they are the PowerShell equivalent. Unsure about dir -v. dir itself is an alias for Get-ChildItem, but I don't know about -v (natural sort of version number)
      - 0x445442 3y ago
        dirs -v presents a numbered stack of directories. Pushd doesn’t just function on one directory but also takes in a number pointing to a directory on the stack. Nothing like this exists out of the box for PS and it’s one of the most productive features in Bash.
revskill 3y ago
apt-get install package-<version> is a nightmare, because it's hard to know which version is the correct one.
- chaxor 3y ago
  Yeah, it's so awful - and IMO windows solves this problem really well. You just don't ever get to build anything - so problem solved! :)
  - shortrounddev 3y ago
    Its not as popular to distribute projects as source on windows, but ive personally built a dozen or so libs and dependencies from cmake into msbuild/visual studio SLN files, so it actually does happen because I've found that Linux devs don't tend to distribute precompiled binaries at all. I think this trend it changing now though because I see a lot of github projects releasing binaries for a lot of different platforms in the releases section.
- spyremeown 3y ago
  I wish it was just a matter of the `-<version>` thing... Debian metadata (control, rules...) and its build system (sbuild, rebuild) is arcane and feels old. Having to maintain a Debian feed is a major PITA.
- opan 3y ago
  Look into guix and guix pack.
- snvzz 3y ago
  >apt-get install package-<version> It's apt install these days.
- CoolCold 3y ago
  Aaand I probably don't remember last time I needed to set version explicitly, it's usually just a single version of everything, mind sharing your case?
Swalden123 3y ago
Regarding NodeJS and being cross platform, why didn’t the company just use path.join?
- deathanatos 3y ago
  Because developers are lazy. I've given up the fight that is "use the language's features for path manipulation" in code review at this point. People just wanna string concat.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    I don't know. This lowers the bar.
    - deathanatos 3y ago
      I don't intend to lower the bar, but I'm tired of the same bad pushback of "it's not my favorite way." It's not just strcat-ing paths together. It's … everything. I've seen databases with crap passwords (think "admin"/"admin"), because someone didn't want to take the time to generate one securely. I've seen systems subsist on a shared username/password (despite that being a security policy violation) because the sysadmins on the same security team responsible for Okta a.) can't take the time to get the assignments done and b.) don't understand Okta (or OIDC, or SAML, or …). I've seen people argue for "I need the list of user emails to import into MailChimp" — no, you most certainly don't: you need to write an email within the system's pre-existing mail functionality, since that respects the users' prefs as to whether they get your spam or not — and then escalate because that's not what they want to do, despite what they want clearly being wrong, and at worse, being a violation of anti-spam laws. I've seen people repeatedly fight factoring stuff into a library "well, we're just going need this code this one time, putting it in a library is too much work" — and they're the forth person/use-case to utter this — and then proceed to hit every corner case that such a library could encapsulate nicely. (But even after that: "so, now that you've hit all the bugs and corners, are you going to library-itize it?" "no, we only need it this once, it's not going to be needed ever again".) I don't know how to raise the bar. HN itself perennially whines about interview processes that deliver any assessment of the candidates technical acumen — or lack thereof. Interviews will be Y/Y/Y/N with the lone dissenter being the only technical interview. And there's no reward in trying to maintain the bar, AFAICT.
deathanatos 3y ago
> If the software is written well, it will be sufficiently cross-platform and modular enough Yes … well … We brought on via acquisition a bunch of Windows devs. It turns out we can't even clone the repository onto their laptops: some files in the repo have ":" in the filename, which is forbidden. There's a "aux.rs", also a verboten filename in Windows. And then there were some that differed only in case, which honestly I don't know how we manage that, as the non-Windows side is macOS, and yet roughly once per year someone introduces two files, same name, differing case into the repo. > that "CRT" shader Okay … that's not what CRTs looked like. Like, the curve seems way overdone compared to my memory, and IIRC the "lines" affect was really only visible on TV/camera. I have no memory of noticing it IRL, and I spent plenty of time at a command prompt. (E.g., this random example — https://i.redd.it/1s3ny22b2va51.jpg https://i.redd.it/1s3ny22b2va51.jpg — matches my memory pretty closely.) (Also there were flat screen CRTs, but those were relatively late to the game and were rapidly obsoleted by actual flat screens.) Edit: but also I want to play a round of Hack¹ with that shader. ¹i.e., quest for The Amulet of Yendor; you might know the newer incarnation, NetHack, but I didn't play that until flat screens, I think; the CRT time would have been on Hack.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Yeah, that looks like it's simulating the rolling lines that could show up in a video of a CRT, which is just an artifact of the camera and display both refreshing in similar fashions/at similar rates but usually not being locked to each other. A similar fixed lined/brightness gradient on a still photo is an artifact of a snapshot vs the persistence of vision effect that makes the screen look uniformly bright. Some people were more sensitive to CRT flickers than others but it didn't look like that, even at 60hz (a low rate for a PC monitor). It was more a flashing-the-whole-screen-on-and-off-constantly effect; the effect of moving lines in videos move far slower than 60hz.
- matthewmorgan 3y ago
  Could they keep the files in WSL and run their IDEs in Windows?
  - deathanatos 3y ago
lucb1e 3y ago
> I know a lot of developers who will opt to do all of their scripting in python these days, even putting #!/bin/python3 at the head of a script so that it runs through the shell. ...which is exactly what you're meant to do. This is not an example of how bad Bash it, it shows that you didn't understand what Bash is. It's expected to use various languages to write code on Linux, nobody wants you to do things in a language that wasn't made for the task. Imagine you had to use Python on the shell and, any time you open a terminal, needed to import os and do something like print(os.path.glob("*")) instead of just opening a terminal and typing "ls" to get your directory listing. Different tools for different jobs. Also the point they try to make about bash looking like a foreign language and having weird syntax. Yes, that's the thing: it's a very specific thing called a shell, not just any old programming language that you're meant to use for things that are not shell scripts. If Python feels more natural to you, that's probably what you should be using. Don't feel like you need to use Bash for bigger tasks than a few lines of code for no reason other than because you're on a system that has it.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  To be fair to OP, I would then go on to label these people as equally ignorant: > A lot of people coming from the Unix-like world of macOS and Linux don't tend to know [PS]. Many people don't know it even exists at all. When I mention the Windows Terminal to people, they think I'm talking about the Windows Command Prompt, a crappy little program I know that PS and the new terminal is not the same as cmd.exe, and that it has advantages like passing objects through pipes instead of stringly typing everything the way that sh-like shells work. But that's about the extent of it. (The powershell command names though, oh boy, even Java method names are better than that.) > PowerShell also runs on Unix-like systems through PowerShell Core I forgot about that. If anyone's interested in this, you may also enjoy learning that you can now run Windows Defender on Linux! And Internet Edgesplorer! The software we've all been waiting for, according to the Microsoft press release :D. These things amuse me to no end, but more seriously, getting to know PS better and trying out this object passing system does sound interesting. Similar to how C# is secretly my favorite language, but it's just not well supported on Linux (mono and .netcore with monodevelop or the electron app called "VS Code" are just not the same as the Windows experience, e.g. Windows Forms and the real Visual Studio being huge omissions for me).
jmbwell 3y ago
Complaining that bash on macOS is old is valid, but it doesn’t seem relevant here. If you’re just going to use Powershell on Windows anyway, then surely bash doesn’t matter on either platform. More relevant in my view is how well the workstation you use supports interacting with your build system. In many organizations, the actual build environment is only ever going to be Debian or alpine in a container, in which case, it doesn’t really matter which computer you have on your desk. If all your building happens remotely on a cloud instance, it hardly matters at all. So by all means, use whatever computer you want. The great thing about the current era of computing is how little depends on the computer for getting work done. The author’s Chromebook story makes this point perfectly. Use what you have or what you like or what you can get, and get on with life, I say.
- selectodude 3y ago
  Mac OS switched to zsh a couple releases ago due to bash being GPL 3 so the shell isn’t old anymore and installing bash is as easy as brew install bash.
  - chrisweekly 3y ago
    The default OS-provided shell is irrelevant; anyone who cares an iota about DX on their dev machine is going to set up their terminal and shell from scratch anyway.
    - bombolo 3y ago
      Only if you use osx… on linux there is no need to do such a strange thing.
      - chrisweekly 3y ago
        Right, because Linux users are famously content to accept OS defaults and have no interest in tool selection or customizing their setup. /s
        3y ago
caleblloyd 3y ago
PowerShell 7 can be installed on Linux and MacOS! Native too, not like cygwin bash. Around the same time that came out, so did WSL so I never really learned PowerShell because now it's so easy to run real bash on Windows.
- nocman 3y ago
  > Native too, not like cygwin bash. Are you suggesting that cygwin's bash is not "native"? It isn't installed by default, obviously, but it is a native Windows executable, as are the other command-line tools generally installed with it.
  - glandium 3y ago
    cygwin has a different ABI, and does weird things for its POSIX compatibility. In that sense, it's not native.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
From everything I've heard about Windows turning into user-hostile bloatware over the last few years, nothing in this post seems like a good enough reason to use it. Perhaps it's Stockholm syndrom, but I honestly like my Unix-y tools (bash, jq, awk) at this point Also, regarding this example { $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; java -jar myprogram.jar; } You can do the same thing in Bash with perhaps slightly more verbosity ( export MYSQL_HOST="MyHost.com"; export MYSQL_USER="MyUser"; sh -c 'echo "using $MYSQL_USER@$MYSQL_HOST"' ) sh -c 'echo "using $MYSQL_USER@$MYSQL_HOST"' outputs: using MyUser@MyHost.com using @
- cyberbanjo 3y ago
  At least one subtle difference, is a bare scope block like TFA has, will print out everything in it instead of the output you would expect, where as Bash behaves more like Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {}. Compare: PS /home/me> { >> $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; >> $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; >> java -jar myprogram.jar; >> } $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; java -jar myprogram.jar; PS /home/me> Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock { >> $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; >> $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; >> java -jar myprogram.jar; >> } Error: Unable to access jarfile myprogram.jar
- emodendroket 3y ago
  People were complaining that Windows was "user-hostile bloatware" as long as there's been a Windows to complain about.
  - cyberbanjo 3y ago
    Sometimes a cliche is a cliche for a reason. I certainly felt the hostility when I discovered the preloaded apps and ads in my Win11 install that aren't included in the much more expensive enterprise version.
  - msla 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614190 > Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu I mean, come on.
AaronFriel 3y ago
I've followed a different path, but I've come to the same conclusion. Along my path, picking up languages like Haskell or Node early on meant using Linux. So since high school I've always had _a_ Linux machine available, but preferred to use Windows as the user interface. Two thing I can say for any naysayers who use a Mac and do devops, backend development etc.: 1. Are you sure your environment that matches your deployment environment? Do you have confidence your server code runs the same on an Apple Silicon Mac as the (very likely) x86-64 and Linux environment your users use? 2. Have you ever noticed how shell scripts on Mac often... don't work the same on Linux? The way to fix that is of course use Homebrew, and, while brew has gotten leagues better, the quality pales in comparison to even Debian testing, Ubuntu main, or Arch and others. As a devops engineer for many years, #2 was death by a thousand cuts. If I could, I'd have replaced every Mac user's userland with GNU coreutils from brew without their permission. To square the circle of preferring Linux systems and Windows' UI, I've done just about every approach you can imagine to make that work, from syncing folders via rsync, to ssh or nfs mounted filesystems. I've used Virtualbox and VMWare and Hyper-V to locally run the Linux environment. There have been a few different X window managers and remote desktop tools, but none of them have been great. WSL1 is where things really began to turn around - what an interesting project to make the NT kernel work as a Linux kernel. It didn't quite pan out, but that was OK. WSL2 made major changes to how WSL worked, and now I can now run Kubernetes, Docker, 3d applications, machine learning (stable diffusion), have a real Linux shell and userland. WSL2 is a true game changer for quality of Linux development on Windows. Being able to `docker run` Stable Diffusion or Llama or what-have-you is incredible. I can imagine a PopOS - or another vendor-backed Linux OS - might persuade me eventually to shed Windows. In the meantime, I don't feel like I'm making any compromises.
- hparadiz 3y ago
  Your shell scripts on Linux don't even work the same way as the docker image based on ubuntu. Resolving those issues is just part of the job. I recently had this issue where my version of SSH was too new compared to that the servers were running and I was getting issues about the cryptographic algorithm being mismatched.
  - 3y ago
lionkor 3y ago
I dont really see the answer to the question in the article, maybe I missed it. You can use PowerShell on Linux. You can use vcpkg on Linux (very well, even). You can learn C++ and you wont need the `_In_` and whatnot. If you use WSL2 for your development, are you even developing (fully) on Windows? What you can't do is really own a copy of windows (any recent one), and have the freedom to decide what tools you will use. There is nothing protecting your system from locking you out of any setting, at any point, and requiring you to buy a different key, subscribing, giving them your data, or whatever else.
- secstate 3y ago
  This, a million times. I am not principled enough to live without closed source hardware and software. But I've experienced too many changes to tools I didn't ask for and didn't want to try to advocate that closed source is better than open source alternatives.
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  > If you use WSL2 for your development, are you even developing (fully) on Windows? Maybe it wasn't clear in the post: I dont use wsl except as a backend for docker. I use powershell, not bash > There is nothing protecting your system from locking you out of any setting, at any point, and requiring you to buy a different key, subscribing, giving them your data, or whatever else. Thats not something I care about
  - secstate 3y ago
    > Thats not something I care about Well what's the point in having a debate about any of this if you've yet to experience closed source software taking something away from you?
0x445442 3y ago
Powershell, an inferior shell to Bash and an inferior scripting language to Python. But probably quite useful for administering corporate windows instances.
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  I personally disagree on both accounts. Bash is gibberish to me and the year I had to dev python professionally was miserable
  - bombolo 3y ago
    I am also miserable when speaking chinese. But I have no dobut that to people who actually speak chinese, it isn't gibberish.
    - shortrounddev 3y ago
      This isn't really an argument against what I said. You can pick and choose your shell language based on preference for syntax. You generally learn a human language because you have to for one reason or another. I think bash has an unintuitive syntax, and I think powershell's is more readable
      - bombolo 3y ago
        If languages were intuitive, it wouldn't take years to learn them.
        shortrounddev 3y ago
        Okay? Are we still talking about preferred shells or are we talking about chinese
        bombolo 3y ago
        We're talking about how your argument made no sense, for any kind of language that exists.
emodendroket 3y ago
I actually kind of agree with the point about PowerShell but I suppose the problem is everyone is so used to bash scripts that they've forgotten how many annoying pitfalls they have and how cryptic they are to anyone not used to writing them. A lot of resistance to PoSh is just about it being something different.
- cyberbanjo 3y ago
  IMHO if you are already fluent in bash and aren't running or administering windows machines, there's not much point to switch. And I personally think PowerShell is nicer, but like 10% not 10x, and they do the same things. If you know some bash though, googling PowerShell and the bash command has been pretty productive for my learning.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    I would agree with what you say, but that's not really a flaw with PowerShell.
shortrounddev 3y ago
I'm disappointed that 90% of the discussion is on the first 3 paragraphs of the article. I wrote about C++ and DirectX, too.
- revelio 3y ago
  Almost nobody works with DirectX outside of game engine developers working on low level parts of the renderer, and there are probably only a few hundred of those worldwide. That's why the new generation (dx12, metal, Vulkan) are so painful to use. No need to make them usable when so few people use them and they want performance and control.
  - shortrounddev 3y ago
    I just think nobody read that far
sys_64738 3y ago
Microsoft has made Linux development cool again after got derailed by macOS. Nowadays you can use almost all Linux tools on Windows. They also provide Windows Terminal which is rather excellent.
- nikau 3y ago
  > Windows Terminal which is rather excellent. I'd go more with buggy but functional once you know its limitations. Copy and paste is broken, tab naming and management is broken, its still pretty rough around the edges.
  - CoolCold 3y ago
    Interested in copy/paste stuff - mind adding details? I use it very often and works for me. For tabs I don't care much as not using them.
    - nikau 3y ago
      If you do copy on highlight (no need to press ctrl-c or similar) its pretty broken. eg. create a split so you have 2 sessions on the screen, highlight text in split A, then highlight text in split B it doesn't un-highlight the text in split A. There are also times when highlighted text doesn't make it to the copy buffer for whatever reason.
      - CoolCold 3y ago
        Yeah, I do use "copy on select" since mIRC/Putty days. Coming back to split - checked, thanks! For me, who prefers having separate windows, not splitting by means of terminal (splitting in tmux on rare occasions though), it's natural to act those independent on selection, giving me visual hint on what I was working on - I see it more as advantage.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Microsoft made win dev tolerable by including Linux. To properly work with git I installed gitbash -- that is essentially Linux in a box, complete with git, ssh and the basic bash tools like cat. To do more complicated things, you can install WSL, which is literally a virtual machine running Linux, well integrated with the Windows system. The problem of course is that well-integrated is not the same as native, but MS does have some of the best languages available, C# is pretty great.
plaguuuuuu 3y ago
I'm a battle-scarred Windows developer (more by chance than by choice, mind you) and even I find Powershell exceptionally annoying. The commands are verbose and the syntax is non-standard in a way that, quite frankly, is unnecessarily and exceptionally annoying. But the worst thing is some super confusing aspect of how scopes for variables etc work.. which I've somehow forgotten already because the last few times I needed to write something in PS I straight-up got ChatGPT to do the legwork.
deafpolygon 3y ago
What a breath of fresh air. A well reasoned post about development on Windows when it seems to be the popular thing on HN just to shit on it [Windows].
subjectsigma 3y ago
I have no idea what the point of this article is. It just seemed like rambling. Are you trying to get us to switch to Windows? To shame macOS into a better dev experience? To justify your own decisions to yourself?
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  I wrote it after reading several articles on Microsoft's docs page which are all stories of developers moving from Mac to Windows. All of those stories boiled down to: "WSL makes it easier to have the same development workflow on the PC as on a mac". I felt this was short-changing a lot of the other features of windows that I like and wanted to point those out and make the point that windows is, I believe, a good development platform even without WSL. Also, many people here are saying "yes, I know all about powershell and the terminal and path variables, this is all obvious", but my experience IRL with developers who use macbooks is that they haven't touched windows since maybe 7 and literally did not know anything about the various features here. So if the information here is unconvincing, thats fine. If its not news to you, then you're probably not the kind of person I'm talking about Addi
  - subjectsigma 3y ago
    See, now that makes a lot more sense. As someone who owns a Mac for personal projects and uses Linux+Windows at work, the article felt like a random collection of facts. I think with that upfront information and a little structure it could be an interesting read.
bdcravens 3y ago
I do a lot of work where I'm exporting data from SQL Server (often needing to rely on scripting semantics and transforming, not just a static dump), and really enjoy using PowerShell for this purpose (though in most cases, I run it from a Linux server or my own Mac)
queil 3y ago
I have gone the other way. Used to be a hardcore C#/.NET Framework dev on Windows and I still occasionally use Windows 11. However, since the advent of containers and dotnet core I've been doing lots of devops work. WSL2 is annoyingly slow and has its quirks vs a normal Linux. Docker Desktop with WSL2 backend is slow too. PowerShell is cross-platform so one can use it on Linux just fine.
lenkite 3y ago
"and there are simply no good command line input parsing libraries for Java." Looks like author missed the most obvious and popular OSS one: https://picocli.info/ https://picocli.info/
stemlord 3y ago
A lot of praise for the "little known" (???) Path variable in windows. But dealing with windows path really sucks for one major reason: there's a shockingly low character limit [0] Also idk if this is a problem for anyone else, but since admin privs are required to add to path, I need to fetch IT every time I need to add to it on my work machine, lol. [0] https://superuser.com/questions/1385854/how-do-i-bypass-restrictions-on-the-length-of-the-path-variable https://superuser.com/questions/1385854/how-do-i-bypass-rest...
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  The PATH variable in windows has a low character limit but if your path is properly set up as a REG_EXPAND_SZ, then you can just add more and more variables to it and I dont think the expanded version counts toward the character limit. One reason you shouldn't save your path variable changes from your terminal is that it implicitly converts to REG_SZ on save
  - stemlord 3y ago
    Yeah, that is what I do. It seems really sloppy though, a tactic for dealing with poor design
tpoacher 3y ago
No hate to OP, but almost every single argument in the article regarding Powershell boils down to them not knowing a thing about bash. I know this is the case, despite the claim in the article that they do, because it's clear from the text. I also felt bash was cryptic before I decided to actually learn it. Now it's one of my favourite languages. All it took was reading "man bash", which is actually super clear and surprisingly enjoyable to read for a manpage. As I was reading this article, initially I felt like I wanted to "rebut" the claims, but by the time I finished reading, I realised I would basically end up having to rebut the whole thing. (and doing so on a phone is simply not worth it). Honestly, learn bash. It's actually beautiful. By all means, use PS too; but judging from your article, you're missing out on a lot of great stuff.
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  You're incorrect. I know bash and the syntax is not user friendly for me. You only had a response to the powershell part?
  - tpoacher 3y ago
    > You're incorrect. I know bash and the syntax is not user friendly for me. We're not disagreeing then. I specifically said I also felt bash felt cryptic back when I thought I "knew" it, but didn't really know it, as it turned out. Casual familiarity, or even frequent but superficial friction with bash definitely leaves one feeling they're dealing with incomprehensible symbols and hackiness most of the time. But, the thing is, I'm not "guessing" you don't know it well enough. I'm inferring it clearly from how you described it in the text. Because it reminds me exactly of how I used to think about it too, before I invested the time and learned to love it. Perhaps you think you know it well enough, but the way you talk about it suggests you don't really. Unless of course you intentionally chose very contrived examples to push a point, but it didn't seem to me that that's what you were trying to do. That's not to say that once you learn it properly you will certainly 100% percent love it and ditch PS of course. I'm just saying from the way you describe how you work with it, you don't sound like someone who's really really gotten comfortable with it and learned to rely on it. And if and when you did, I suspect you'd start liking it more. Happy to be proven wrong of course (not that that's important either way, we're just random guys expressing personal opinions over the internet :p ). > You only had a response to the powershell part? Yes. I don't really have a strong opinion (positive or negative) about the rest. Nicely written though, thanks for the read. The bit that I did agree with quite a bit was the sad state of macs. But I don't think that necessarily makes the current Windows experience the pinnacle of development; it just makes macs worse. (how the Apple marketing machine manages to promote macs as "the best at X" when they're arguably pretty consistently the worst at X, for most Xs, is absolutely mindblowing to me).

120 points by shortrounddev 3y ago

After 8 years on macOS, I was forced into developing on Windows back in 2015 when I was making a VR game. WSL1 hit at exactly that time and once I suffered through setting up the environment on ConEmu (Windows Terminal nowadays is wonderful), I never looked back.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thomasjb 3y ago

I keep on seeing all this talk about Powershell, and it's inspiring me to maybe learn some, although I've already commenced pursuit of skill in bash and python

causality0 3y ago
Telling ChatGPT to write you a powershell script and then explain what every part of it does makes learning it really fast. It's super handy. Powershell scripts have solved so many time consuming problems for me, like having one-click shortcuts for changing my desktop resolution or fixing all the file names in a 20TB media archive.
newprint 3y ago
After 3 decades working on Windows, I recently got into Linux and stared learning bash through "The Linux Command Line, 5th ed." book and watching youtube videos. Powershell is so much nicer and a lot more productive to work with compared to bash. Unlike the bash commands that returns strings, Powershell commands return objects. Working in any OOP language and Powershell feels very natural.
- cyberbanjo 3y ago
  Just to corroborate from the opposite direction, I have run exclusively Linux on my personal machines for nearly a decade, and I started a new job where I get to use PowerShell, and it's really amazing, the amount of grep/tail/head (or Get-ChildItem/Select -First/-Last) I have to do is so much less, it feels so much less klunky. Probably the only thing I don't like more so far is Get-Help, because it doesnt put you into a pager with search, it just dumps to text. EDIT: apparently I need Help not Get-Help for paging EDIT2: and I hate that PowerShell doesn't support readline/emacs keybindings
  - peteri 3y ago
    I thought the PSReadline module had some of that but then it might be a "nearly" compatible experience which can be really jarring when you hit the edge cases.
    - cyberbanjo 3y ago
      Maybe I just didn't have enabled, thanks for reminding me, seems good enough for me
- 0x445442 3y ago
  What’s the dirs -v, pushd and popd equivalent in PS?
  - shortrounddev 3y ago
    What do those do
    - metaltyphoon 3y ago
      Keep a stack of dirs where u can jump very quickly into.
  - cyberbanjo 3y ago
    popd and pushd are aliases for Pop-Location and Push-Location, so they are the PowerShell equivalent. Unsure about dir -v. dir itself is an alias for Get-ChildItem, but I don't know about -v (natural sort of version number)
    - 0x445442 3y ago
      dirs -v presents a numbered stack of directories. Pushd doesn’t just function on one directory but also takes in a number pointing to a directory on the stack. Nothing like this exists out of the box for PS and it’s one of the most productive features in Bash.

revskill 3y ago

apt-get install package-<version> is a nightmare, because it's hard to know which version is the correct one.

chaxor 3y ago
Yeah, it's so awful - and IMO windows solves this problem really well. You just don't ever get to build anything - so problem solved! :)
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  Its not as popular to distribute projects as source on windows, but ive personally built a dozen or so libs and dependencies from cmake into msbuild/visual studio SLN files, so it actually does happen because I've found that Linux devs don't tend to distribute precompiled binaries at all. I think this trend it changing now though because I see a lot of github projects releasing binaries for a lot of different platforms in the releases section.
spyremeown 3y ago
I wish it was just a matter of the `-<version>` thing... Debian metadata (control, rules...) and its build system (sbuild, rebuild) is arcane and feels old. Having to maintain a Debian feed is a major PITA.
opan 3y ago
Look into guix and guix pack.
snvzz 3y ago
>apt-get install package-<version> It's apt install these days.
CoolCold 3y ago
Aaand I probably don't remember last time I needed to set version explicitly, it's usually just a single version of everything, mind sharing your case?

Swalden123 3y ago

Regarding NodeJS and being cross platform, why didn’t the company just use path.join?

deathanatos 3y ago
Because developers are lazy. I've given up the fight that is "use the language's features for path manipulation" in code review at this point. People just wanna string concat.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  I don't know. This lowers the bar.
  - deathanatos 3y ago
    I don't intend to lower the bar, but I'm tired of the same bad pushback of "it's not my favorite way." It's not just strcat-ing paths together. It's … everything. I've seen databases with crap passwords (think "admin"/"admin"), because someone didn't want to take the time to generate one securely. I've seen systems subsist on a shared username/password (despite that being a security policy violation) because the sysadmins on the same security team responsible for Okta a.) can't take the time to get the assignments done and b.) don't understand Okta (or OIDC, or SAML, or …). I've seen people argue for "I need the list of user emails to import into MailChimp" — no, you most certainly don't: you need to write an email within the system's pre-existing mail functionality, since that respects the users' prefs as to whether they get your spam or not — and then escalate because that's not what they want to do, despite what they want clearly being wrong, and at worse, being a violation of anti-spam laws. I've seen people repeatedly fight factoring stuff into a library "well, we're just going need this code this one time, putting it in a library is too much work" — and they're the forth person/use-case to utter this — and then proceed to hit every corner case that such a library could encapsulate nicely. (But even after that: "so, now that you've hit all the bugs and corners, are you going to library-itize it?" "no, we only need it this once, it's not going to be needed ever again".) I don't know how to raise the bar. HN itself perennially whines about interview processes that deliver any assessment of the candidates technical acumen — or lack thereof. Interviews will be Y/Y/Y/N with the lone dissenter being the only technical interview. And there's no reward in trying to maintain the bar, AFAICT.

deathanatos 3y ago

> If the software is written well, it will be sufficiently cross-platform and modular enough Yes … well … We brought on via acquisition a bunch of Windows devs. It turns out we can't even clone the repository onto their laptops: some files in the repo have ":" in the filename, which is forbidden. There's a "aux.rs", also a verboten filename in Windows. And then there were some that differed only in case, which honestly I don't know how we manage that, as the non-Windows side is macOS, and yet roughly once per year someone introduces two files, same name, differing case into the repo. > that "CRT" shader Okay … that's not what CRTs looked like. Like, the curve seems way overdone compared to my memory, and IIRC the "lines" affect was really only visible on TV/camera. I have no memory of noticing it IRL, and I spent plenty of time at a command prompt. (E.g., this random example — https://i.redd.it/1s3ny22b2va51.jpg https://i.redd.it/1s3ny22b2va51.jpg — matches my memory pretty closely.) (Also there were flat screen CRTs, but those were relatively late to the game and were rapidly obsoleted by actual flat screens.) Edit: but also I want to play a round of Hack¹ with that shader. ¹i.e., quest for The Amulet of Yendor; you might know the newer incarnation, NetHack, but I didn't play that until flat screens, I think; the CRT time would have been on Hack.

majormajor 3y ago
Yeah, that looks like it's simulating the rolling lines that could show up in a video of a CRT, which is just an artifact of the camera and display both refreshing in similar fashions/at similar rates but usually not being locked to each other. A similar fixed lined/brightness gradient on a still photo is an artifact of a snapshot vs the persistence of vision effect that makes the screen look uniformly bright. Some people were more sensitive to CRT flickers than others but it didn't look like that, even at 60hz (a low rate for a PC monitor). It was more a flashing-the-whole-screen-on-and-off-constantly effect; the effect of moving lines in videos move far slower than 60hz.
matthewmorgan 3y ago
Could they keep the files in WSL and run their IDEs in Windows?
- deathanatos 3y ago

lucb1e 3y ago

> I know a lot of developers who will opt to do all of their scripting in python these days, even putting #!/bin/python3 at the head of a script so that it runs through the shell. ...which is exactly what you're meant to do. This is not an example of how bad Bash it, it shows that you didn't understand what Bash is. It's expected to use various languages to write code on Linux, nobody wants you to do things in a language that wasn't made for the task. Imagine you had to use Python on the shell and, any time you open a terminal, needed to import os and do something like print(os.path.glob("*")) instead of just opening a terminal and typing "ls" to get your directory listing. Different tools for different jobs. Also the point they try to make about bash looking like a foreign language and having weird syntax. Yes, that's the thing: it's a very specific thing called a shell, not just any old programming language that you're meant to use for things that are not shell scripts. If Python feels more natural to you, that's probably what you should be using. Don't feel like you need to use Bash for bigger tasks than a few lines of code for no reason other than because you're on a system that has it.

lucb1e 3y ago
To be fair to OP, I would then go on to label these people as equally ignorant: > A lot of people coming from the Unix-like world of macOS and Linux don't tend to know [PS]. Many people don't know it even exists at all. When I mention the Windows Terminal to people, they think I'm talking about the Windows Command Prompt, a crappy little program I know that PS and the new terminal is not the same as cmd.exe, and that it has advantages like passing objects through pipes instead of stringly typing everything the way that sh-like shells work. But that's about the extent of it. (The powershell command names though, oh boy, even Java method names are better than that.) > PowerShell also runs on Unix-like systems through PowerShell Core I forgot about that. If anyone's interested in this, you may also enjoy learning that you can now run Windows Defender on Linux! And Internet Edgesplorer! The software we've all been waiting for, according to the Microsoft press release :D. These things amuse me to no end, but more seriously, getting to know PS better and trying out this object passing system does sound interesting. Similar to how C# is secretly my favorite language, but it's just not well supported on Linux (mono and .netcore with monodevelop or the electron app called "VS Code" are just not the same as the Windows experience, e.g. Windows Forms and the real Visual Studio being huge omissions for me).

jmbwell 3y ago

Complaining that bash on macOS is old is valid, but it doesn’t seem relevant here. If you’re just going to use Powershell on Windows anyway, then surely bash doesn’t matter on either platform. More relevant in my view is how well the workstation you use supports interacting with your build system. In many organizations, the actual build environment is only ever going to be Debian or alpine in a container, in which case, it doesn’t really matter which computer you have on your desk. If all your building happens remotely on a cloud instance, it hardly matters at all. So by all means, use whatever computer you want. The great thing about the current era of computing is how little depends on the computer for getting work done. The author’s Chromebook story makes this point perfectly. Use what you have or what you like or what you can get, and get on with life, I say.

selectodude 3y ago
Mac OS switched to zsh a couple releases ago due to bash being GPL 3 so the shell isn’t old anymore and installing bash is as easy as brew install bash.
- chrisweekly 3y ago
  The default OS-provided shell is irrelevant; anyone who cares an iota about DX on their dev machine is going to set up their terminal and shell from scratch anyway.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    Only if you use osx… on linux there is no need to do such a strange thing.
    - chrisweekly 3y ago
      Right, because Linux users are famously content to accept OS defaults and have no interest in tool selection or customizing their setup. /s
      - 3y ago

caleblloyd 3y ago

PowerShell 7 can be installed on Linux and MacOS! Native too, not like cygwin bash. Around the same time that came out, so did WSL so I never really learned PowerShell because now it's so easy to run real bash on Windows.

nocman 3y ago
> Native too, not like cygwin bash. Are you suggesting that cygwin's bash is not "native"? It isn't installed by default, obviously, but it is a native Windows executable, as are the other command-line tools generally installed with it.
- glandium 3y ago
  cygwin has a different ABI, and does weird things for its POSIX compatibility. In that sense, it's not native.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

From everything I've heard about Windows turning into user-hostile bloatware over the last few years, nothing in this post seems like a good enough reason to use it. Perhaps it's Stockholm syndrom, but I honestly like my Unix-y tools (bash, jq, awk) at this point Also, regarding this example { $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; java -jar myprogram.jar; } You can do the same thing in Bash with perhaps slightly more verbosity ( export MYSQL_HOST="MyHost.com"; export MYSQL_USER="MyUser"; sh -c 'echo "using $MYSQL_USER@$MYSQL_HOST"' ) sh -c 'echo "using $MYSQL_USER@$MYSQL_HOST"' outputs: using MyUser@MyHost.com using @

cyberbanjo 3y ago
At least one subtle difference, is a bare scope block like TFA has, will print out everything in it instead of the output you would expect, where as Bash behaves more like Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {}. Compare: PS /home/me> { >> $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; >> $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; >> java -jar myprogram.jar; >> } $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; java -jar myprogram.jar; PS /home/me> Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock { >> $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; >> $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; >> java -jar myprogram.jar; >> } Error: Unable to access jarfile myprogram.jar
emodendroket 3y ago
People were complaining that Windows was "user-hostile bloatware" as long as there's been a Windows to complain about.
- cyberbanjo 3y ago
  Sometimes a cliche is a cliche for a reason. I certainly felt the hostility when I discovered the preloaded apps and ads in my Win11 install that aren't included in the much more expensive enterprise version.
- msla 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614190 > Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu I mean, come on.

AaronFriel 3y ago

I've followed a different path, but I've come to the same conclusion. Along my path, picking up languages like Haskell or Node early on meant using Linux. So since high school I've always had _a_ Linux machine available, but preferred to use Windows as the user interface. Two thing I can say for any naysayers who use a Mac and do devops, backend development etc.: 1. Are you sure your environment that matches your deployment environment? Do you have confidence your server code runs the same on an Apple Silicon Mac as the (very likely) x86-64 and Linux environment your users use? 2. Have you ever noticed how shell scripts on Mac often... don't work the same on Linux? The way to fix that is of course use Homebrew, and, while brew has gotten leagues better, the quality pales in comparison to even Debian testing, Ubuntu main, or Arch and others. As a devops engineer for many years, #2 was death by a thousand cuts. If I could, I'd have replaced every Mac user's userland with GNU coreutils from brew without their permission. To square the circle of preferring Linux systems and Windows' UI, I've done just about every approach you can imagine to make that work, from syncing folders via rsync, to ssh or nfs mounted filesystems. I've used Virtualbox and VMWare and Hyper-V to locally run the Linux environment. There have been a few different X window managers and remote desktop tools, but none of them have been great. WSL1 is where things really began to turn around - what an interesting project to make the NT kernel work as a Linux kernel. It didn't quite pan out, but that was OK. WSL2 made major changes to how WSL worked, and now I can now run Kubernetes, Docker, 3d applications, machine learning (stable diffusion), have a real Linux shell and userland. WSL2 is a true game changer for quality of Linux development on Windows. Being able to `docker run` Stable Diffusion or Llama or what-have-you is incredible. I can imagine a PopOS - or another vendor-backed Linux OS - might persuade me eventually to shed Windows. In the meantime, I don't feel like I'm making any compromises.

hparadiz 3y ago
Your shell scripts on Linux don't even work the same way as the docker image based on ubuntu. Resolving those issues is just part of the job. I recently had this issue where my version of SSH was too new compared to that the servers were running and I was getting issues about the cryptographic algorithm being mismatched.
- 3y ago

lionkor 3y ago

I dont really see the answer to the question in the article, maybe I missed it. You can use PowerShell on Linux. You can use vcpkg on Linux (very well, even). You can learn C++ and you wont need the `_In_` and whatnot. If you use WSL2 for your development, are you even developing (fully) on Windows? What you can't do is really own a copy of windows (any recent one), and have the freedom to decide what tools you will use. There is nothing protecting your system from locking you out of any setting, at any point, and requiring you to buy a different key, subscribing, giving them your data, or whatever else.

secstate 3y ago
This, a million times. I am not principled enough to live without closed source hardware and software. But I've experienced too many changes to tools I didn't ask for and didn't want to try to advocate that closed source is better than open source alternatives.
shortrounddev 3y ago
> If you use WSL2 for your development, are you even developing (fully) on Windows? Maybe it wasn't clear in the post: I dont use wsl except as a backend for docker. I use powershell, not bash > There is nothing protecting your system from locking you out of any setting, at any point, and requiring you to buy a different key, subscribing, giving them your data, or whatever else. Thats not something I care about
- secstate 3y ago
  > Thats not something I care about Well what's the point in having a debate about any of this if you've yet to experience closed source software taking something away from you?

0x445442 3y ago

Powershell, an inferior shell to Bash and an inferior scripting language to Python. But probably quite useful for administering corporate windows instances.

shortrounddev 3y ago
I personally disagree on both accounts. Bash is gibberish to me and the year I had to dev python professionally was miserable
- bombolo 3y ago
  I am also miserable when speaking chinese. But I have no dobut that to people who actually speak chinese, it isn't gibberish.
  - shortrounddev 3y ago
    This isn't really an argument against what I said. You can pick and choose your shell language based on preference for syntax. You generally learn a human language because you have to for one reason or another. I think bash has an unintuitive syntax, and I think powershell's is more readable
    - bombolo 3y ago
      If languages were intuitive, it wouldn't take years to learn them.
      - shortrounddev 3y ago
        Okay? Are we still talking about preferred shells or are we talking about chinese
        bombolo 3y ago
        We're talking about how your argument made no sense, for any kind of language that exists.

emodendroket 3y ago

I actually kind of agree with the point about PowerShell but I suppose the problem is everyone is so used to bash scripts that they've forgotten how many annoying pitfalls they have and how cryptic they are to anyone not used to writing them. A lot of resistance to PoSh is just about it being something different.

cyberbanjo 3y ago
IMHO if you are already fluent in bash and aren't running or administering windows machines, there's not much point to switch. And I personally think PowerShell is nicer, but like 10% not 10x, and they do the same things. If you know some bash though, googling PowerShell and the bash command has been pretty productive for my learning.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  I would agree with what you say, but that's not really a flaw with PowerShell.

shortrounddev 3y ago

I'm disappointed that 90% of the discussion is on the first 3 paragraphs of the article. I wrote about C++ and DirectX, too.

revelio 3y ago
Almost nobody works with DirectX outside of game engine developers working on low level parts of the renderer, and there are probably only a few hundred of those worldwide. That's why the new generation (dx12, metal, Vulkan) are so painful to use. No need to make them usable when so few people use them and they want performance and control.
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  I just think nobody read that far

sys_64738 3y ago

Microsoft has made Linux development cool again after got derailed by macOS. Nowadays you can use almost all Linux tools on Windows. They also provide Windows Terminal which is rather excellent.

nikau 3y ago
> Windows Terminal which is rather excellent. I'd go more with buggy but functional once you know its limitations. Copy and paste is broken, tab naming and management is broken, its still pretty rough around the edges.
- CoolCold 3y ago
  Interested in copy/paste stuff - mind adding details? I use it very often and works for me. For tabs I don't care much as not using them.
  - nikau 3y ago
    If you do copy on highlight (no need to press ctrl-c or similar) its pretty broken. eg. create a split so you have 2 sessions on the screen, highlight text in split A, then highlight text in split B it doesn't un-highlight the text in split A. There are also times when highlighted text doesn't make it to the copy buffer for whatever reason.
    - CoolCold 3y ago
      Yeah, I do use "copy on select" since mIRC/Putty days. Coming back to split - checked, thanks! For me, who prefers having separate windows, not splitting by means of terminal (splitting in tmux on rare occasions though), it's natural to act those independent on selection, giving me visual hint on what I was working on - I see it more as advantage.
tomjen3 3y ago
Microsoft made win dev tolerable by including Linux. To properly work with git I installed gitbash -- that is essentially Linux in a box, complete with git, ssh and the basic bash tools like cat. To do more complicated things, you can install WSL, which is literally a virtual machine running Linux, well integrated with the Windows system. The problem of course is that well-integrated is not the same as native, but MS does have some of the best languages available, C# is pretty great.

plaguuuuuu 3y ago

I'm a battle-scarred Windows developer (more by chance than by choice, mind you) and even I find Powershell exceptionally annoying. The commands are verbose and the syntax is non-standard in a way that, quite frankly, is unnecessarily and exceptionally annoying. But the worst thing is some super confusing aspect of how scopes for variables etc work.. which I've somehow forgotten already because the last few times I needed to write something in PS I straight-up got ChatGPT to do the legwork.

deafpolygon 3y ago

What a breath of fresh air. A well reasoned post about development on Windows when it seems to be the popular thing on HN just to shit on it [Windows].

subjectsigma 3y ago

I have no idea what the point of this article is. It just seemed like rambling. Are you trying to get us to switch to Windows? To shame macOS into a better dev experience? To justify your own decisions to yourself?

shortrounddev 3y ago
I wrote it after reading several articles on Microsoft's docs page which are all stories of developers moving from Mac to Windows. All of those stories boiled down to: "WSL makes it easier to have the same development workflow on the PC as on a mac". I felt this was short-changing a lot of the other features of windows that I like and wanted to point those out and make the point that windows is, I believe, a good development platform even without WSL. Also, many people here are saying "yes, I know all about powershell and the terminal and path variables, this is all obvious", but my experience IRL with developers who use macbooks is that they haven't touched windows since maybe 7 and literally did not know anything about the various features here. So if the information here is unconvincing, thats fine. If its not news to you, then you're probably not the kind of person I'm talking about Addi
- subjectsigma 3y ago
  See, now that makes a lot more sense. As someone who owns a Mac for personal projects and uses Linux+Windows at work, the article felt like a random collection of facts. I think with that upfront information and a little structure it could be an interesting read.

bdcravens 3y ago

I do a lot of work where I'm exporting data from SQL Server (often needing to rely on scripting semantics and transforming, not just a static dump), and really enjoy using PowerShell for this purpose (though in most cases, I run it from a Linux server or my own Mac)

queil 3y ago

I have gone the other way. Used to be a hardcore C#/.NET Framework dev on Windows and I still occasionally use Windows 11. However, since the advent of containers and dotnet core I've been doing lots of devops work. WSL2 is annoyingly slow and has its quirks vs a normal Linux. Docker Desktop with WSL2 backend is slow too. PowerShell is cross-platform so one can use it on Linux just fine.

lenkite 3y ago

"and there are simply no good command line input parsing libraries for Java." Looks like author missed the most obvious and popular OSS one: https://picocli.info/ https://picocli.info/

stemlord 3y ago

A lot of praise for the "little known" (???) Path variable in windows. But dealing with windows path really sucks for one major reason: there's a shockingly low character limit [0] Also idk if this is a problem for anyone else, but since admin privs are required to add to path, I need to fetch IT every time I need to add to it on my work machine, lol. [0] https://superuser.com/questions/1385854/how-do-i-bypass-restrictions-on-the-length-of-the-path-variable https://superuser.com/questions/1385854/how-do-i-bypass-rest...

shortrounddev 3y ago
The PATH variable in windows has a low character limit but if your path is properly set up as a REG_EXPAND_SZ, then you can just add more and more variables to it and I dont think the expanded version counts toward the character limit. One reason you shouldn't save your path variable changes from your terminal is that it implicitly converts to REG_SZ on save
- stemlord 3y ago
  Yeah, that is what I do. It seems really sloppy though, a tactic for dealing with poor design

tpoacher 3y ago

No hate to OP, but almost every single argument in the article regarding Powershell boils down to them not knowing a thing about bash. I know this is the case, despite the claim in the article that they do, because it's clear from the text. I also felt bash was cryptic before I decided to actually learn it. Now it's one of my favourite languages. All it took was reading "man bash", which is actually super clear and surprisingly enjoyable to read for a manpage. As I was reading this article, initially I felt like I wanted to "rebut" the claims, but by the time I finished reading, I realised I would basically end up having to rebut the whole thing. (and doing so on a phone is simply not worth it). Honestly, learn bash. It's actually beautiful. By all means, use PS too; but judging from your article, you're missing out on a lot of great stuff.

shortrounddev 3y ago
You're incorrect. I know bash and the syntax is not user friendly for me. You only had a response to the powershell part?
- tpoacher 3y ago
  > You're incorrect. I know bash and the syntax is not user friendly for me. We're not disagreeing then. I specifically said I also felt bash felt cryptic back when I thought I "knew" it, but didn't really know it, as it turned out. Casual familiarity, or even frequent but superficial friction with bash definitely leaves one feeling they're dealing with incomprehensible symbols and hackiness most of the time. But, the thing is, I'm not "guessing" you don't know it well enough. I'm inferring it clearly from how you described it in the text. Because it reminds me exactly of how I used to think about it too, before I invested the time and learned to love it. Perhaps you think you know it well enough, but the way you talk about it suggests you don't really. Unless of course you intentionally chose very contrived examples to push a point, but it didn't seem to me that that's what you were trying to do. That's not to say that once you learn it properly you will certainly 100% percent love it and ditch PS of course. I'm just saying from the way you describe how you work with it, you don't sound like someone who's really really gotten comfortable with it and learned to rely on it. And if and when you did, I suspect you'd start liking it more. Happy to be proven wrong of course (not that that's important either way, we're just random guys expressing personal opinions over the internet :p ). > You only had a response to the powershell part? Yes. I don't really have a strong opinion (positive or negative) about the rest. Nicely written though, thanks for the read. The bit that I did agree with quite a bit was the sad state of macs. But I don't think that necessarily makes the current Windows experience the pinnacle of development; it just makes macs worse. (how the Apple marketing machine manages to promote macs as "the best at X" when they're arguably pretty consistently the worst at X, for most Xs, is absolutely mindblowing to me).