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posted by martyb on Monday April 08 2019, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the Powers-Hell? dept.

Microsoft Announces PowerShell 7

Microsoft has just announced PowerShell 7, a new major release that comes only a few days after the company originally introduced version 6.2

And while it naturally makes more sense for the company to roll out PowerShell 6.3 rather than a whole new version 7.0, the company explains in a blog post that it's all as part of the efforts to align the versions of all platforms.

Steve Lee, Principal Software Engineer Manager, PowerShell, explains that Microsoft noticed a growing usage pattern on Linux, but not on Windows.

"Windows usage has not been growing as significantly, surprising given that PowerShell was popularized on the Windows platform," Lee explains. [...] The next version of PowerShell will thus be available on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and the company explains it'll be available with LTS (Long Term Servicing) and non-LTS plans.

Also at ZDNet.

Previously: MS Releases Powershell SDC - to Manage Config for.... Linux
Powershell for Linux
Your wget (and curl) is Broken and Should DIE, GitHubbers Tell Microsoft


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:36PM (#826987)

    Great summation.

    I'm not a Programmer with a capital P, but I do lots of shell scripting as part of system administration tasks; I've worn both linux and windows hats for the last 15 years and I've done extensive scripting on both OSes. Powershell is to me more of a programming language than a shell - it makes what I'm used to being a simple set of operations, turns them into a load of overly verbose commands, and then you have to either spend half your life piping into `get-member` or `select-object -property *` to see if the info you want was actually there or not, or if you maybe need to go and grab from some other object or convert that particular int into a datetime; bash and friends show you everything and provide you with really awesome tools for throwing away or converting stuff you don't want.

    I'm working in a windows team currently but we've been bringing in a lot of linux kit. Lots of the people were agog at having someone who could do "linux scripting", thinking it was some sort of prodigal thing; after showing them a few basic utils and some loops in bash they all took to it remarkably easy, because it's so much more WYSIWYG in nature than futzing around in powershell. bash and other *sh's make the transition from "remember this command" to "put this list of commands in a file and run it" to "wrap those commands in some logic and variables" really simple and really natural in a way I've just never experienced with powershell. Ultimately I don't think I've got an object-oriented brain because despite writing powershell stuff for over ten years now it still doesn't come naturally to me whereas bash scripts just trip off the fingers.

    Conversely, powershell allows you to do certain far more powerful things than you could realistically do in bash (writing REST interface stuff in JSON being a trendy example... but it was whilst porting a powershell script I wrote to linux that I discovered the python requests library which made the script even more bone-headedly simple than powershell) but the barrier to entry is much higher than I feel it is for bash. That said there's a whole bunch of windows utilities with very deep and very useful powershell interfaces that even python on windows can't hold a candle to, but those feel more of a necessary evil to me than a boon of powershell itself.

    My two cents.