On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 12:03:09 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/powershell-is-microsof...

One of the commenters on the Phoronix item <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-PowerShell-On-Linux> helpfully linked this <https://mohd-akram.github.io/2013/05/16/a-python-developers-guide-to-powershell> “Python Developer’s Guide to PowerShell”. Looking at it, I see something that is trying to be both a shell language and a programming language. In a shell language, you normally want the words you type to be taken literally. Which means you need a special notation for substituting variable and expression values, e.g. the various forms of “$” prefix in Bash and other common shells. In a programming language, it’s the other way round: anything you want to be taken literally, you put in quotation marks. Everything else is interpreted as variables, expressions, keywords etc. This also means that shell languages are suited to writing shorter, simpler scripts; for anything more complex, a programming language is better. This is because having to use special shell-style prefixes in a programming language just makes for clutter and detracts from readability. PowerShell, in trying to be both, ends up being suited for neither.