How To Sell Your Idea To Execs? This Programmer Wrote The Playbook. Warning: This article contains swearing (Quoted, from Bill Gates).

Warning: This article contains swearing (Quoted, from Bill Gates).

As a UNIX-aligned engineer, I’ve always looked down on anything Microsoft.

But a recent cross-platform project forced me to learn PowerShell — a technology which, just like blockchain, is amusing by how its core idea almost makes sense.

I want to explore the psychological impact that a piece of documentation had on me. A political piece on par with Machiavelli, “The Monad Manifesto.”

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.

    The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.

    I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…

    • LwL@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 hours ago

      Powershell is nice for scripting things close to the (windows) OS. But (granted I’m not exactly some PS wizard, I’ve just used it a few times for minor things at work) I agree it often feels unnecessarily verbose and cumbersome. For example the fact that you need to define a whole function to alias even just a single command with parameters. And just overall I find it very hard to read (though maybe that’s on the guy that did the powershell stuff before me, I don’t have great sample size here).

      But I’ll take what I can get.

    • underscores@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      PowerShell is fantastic in practice but whenever I think of writing shell scripts I think of bash first.

      Bash is a lot more pleasant to work with overall, the biggest concern most people have is that it can be cryptic. IMO PowerShell scripts can be the exact same kind of voodoo.