PowerShell Architect Retires After Decades At the Prompt (theregister.com) 32
Jeffrey Snover, the driving force behind PowerShell, has retired after a career that reshaped Windows administration. The Register reports: Snover's retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft, during which he pulled the company back from imposing a graphical user interface (GUI) on administrators who really just wanted a command line from which to run their scripts. Snover joined Microsoft as the 20th century drew to a close. The company was all about its Windows operating system and user interface in those days -- great for end users, but not so good for administrators managing fleets of servers. Snover correctly predicted a shift to server datacenters, which would require automated management. A powerful shell... a PowerShell, if you will.
[...] Over the years, Snover has dropped the occasional pearl of wisdom or shared memories from his time getting PowerShell off the ground. A recent favorite concerns the naming of Cmdlets and their original name in Monad: Function Units, or FUs. Snover wrote: "This abbreviation reflected the Unix smart-ass culture I was embracing at the time. Plus I was developing this in a hostile environment, and my sense of diplomacy was not yet fully operational." Snover doubtless has many more war stories to share. In the meantime, however, we wish him well. Many admins owe Snover thanks for persuading Microsoft that its GUI obsession did not translate to the datacenter, and for lengthy careers in gluing enterprise systems together with some scripted automation.
[...] Over the years, Snover has dropped the occasional pearl of wisdom or shared memories from his time getting PowerShell off the ground. A recent favorite concerns the naming of Cmdlets and their original name in Monad: Function Units, or FUs. Snover wrote: "This abbreviation reflected the Unix smart-ass culture I was embracing at the time. Plus I was developing this in a hostile environment, and my sense of diplomacy was not yet fully operational." Snover doubtless has many more war stories to share. In the meantime, however, we wish him well. Many admins owe Snover thanks for persuading Microsoft that its GUI obsession did not translate to the datacenter, and for lengthy careers in gluing enterprise systems together with some scripted automation.
I would expect (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft to start trashing powershell at this point. Most of the time it's one person protecting the functionality of good tools, then it all goes away when they leave.
Re:I would expect (Score:4, Insightful)
It'll be serving up ads and sharing all your prompts with M$ by this time next week. If it's not already.
Re: (Score:2)
It already does show ads!
"Install the latest PowerShell for new features and improvements! https://aka.ms/PSWindows [aka.ms]"
Re: I would expect (Score:2)
I feel like a large number of users here are still wailing against the Microsoft of 15 years ago. They're still hostile to home edition end users, of course, but they've very much cleaned up their technical posture compared to ages ago. Are they perfect? No, but they're nowhere near as developer/admin/OSS/*nix/etc hostile as they used to be.
Re: I would expect (Score:5, Insightful)
They're at least as incompetent as they have always been and they have been stuffing more and more ads into their products so your objection is ridiculous.
They just had a big stupid unexplained outage, defending them right now is more insane even than usual.
Re: I would expect (Score:2)
*wanking motion*
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You should make that your sig and save us all the trouble
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They just had a big stupid unexplained outage, defending them right now is more insane even than usual.
Yeah another outage. That still gives them more uptime than most company's self managed systems. Whoop de fucking do.
Outages happened all the time, they are only newsworthy now that multiple users are affected at once. There's zero evidence that Microsoft's services are any worse than any other, and there's ample evidence that their reliability is higher than self managed infrastructure for all but the very best manage IT systems. And very few systems fall under that category thanks to IT being classified a
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Outages happened all the time, they are only newsworthy now that multiple users are affected at once.
The whole point of cloudy bullshit on someone else's computer is that it's supposed to be fault tolerant.
But yeah, keep stroking that hateboner buddy. You look like a real adult there.
Keep sucking Nadya's cock, sucker. You look good on your knees.
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But yeah, keep stroking that hateboner buddy. You look like a real adult there.
Keep sucking Nadya's cock, sucker. You look good on your knees.
Get a room, you two!
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And it is fault tolerant, amazingly so. The number of organisations who are able to keep uptime above that of Azure, or AWS is vanishingly small.
You're one of those idiots who thinks everything needs to be perfect to work. The rest of the world recognises the word "better" and gets on with their lives.
Keep sucking Nadya's cock, sucker. You look good on your knees.
Grow up child.
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I have never used the Home edition of windows because I haven't seen a reason too, but I'm more of a power user that still hates the "Settings" functionality that's a dumbed down feature-lacking set of controls and as long as I can find the control panel and items for that I'm using them.
Since Windows 7 everything has gone downhill into the crapper by being more and more annoying to use.
Powershell do have some features, but it's also requiring a lot of work to learn and use. I can understand that there are
Snover left Microsoft in 2022 (Score:2)
Microsoft to start trashing powershell at this point. Most of the time it's one person protecting the functionality of good tools, then it all goes away when they leave.
Literally, the first fucking sentence of the summary says that "Snover's retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft", specifically, the fucking article says "In 2022, Snover left Microsoft spent a few years at Google."
Corecursive podcast interview (Score:2)
verbose (Score:5, Informative)
I like powershell well enough. But it is too verbose. Dude must like to type.
Re:verbose (Score:4, Informative)
I only worked with it for a while on Windows 7 and server 2008-2012.
I did not like it at all, it making things more complex compared to using the command prompt. The need to load the set of commands for some program, then the trouble of querying for the available command options.
Simply querying against an executable made work easier.
I don't know if things changed nowadays, but I'm glad I don't have to deal with Microsoft any longer apart from my old Windows 7 game laptop.
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Re: (Score:2)
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And a lot of $s to purchase.
But it was good stuff. It was an environment made for coders by coders, not something that was invented in some laboratory based on a lot of academic theories.
LIB$GET_FOREIGN was one of my goto calls when coding in VAX-Pascal in the late 1980's
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Thank you for making it (Score:2)
Thank You Mr. Snover
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Well said. I agree.
I am consistently impressed with powershell. Yes, it is verbose sometimes. But I have been able craft some one liners that are useful, and ‘just feel right’ to me.
In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
PS has excessively verbose errors (Score:2)
It could have taken a lesson from VAX/VMS DCL error messages which were configurable verbosity.
PowerShell was a wasted opportunity (Score:2)
Would it have killed Microsoft to have written a cmdlet called Get-DosChildItem that behaved like the old command and alias to that? Same for the other commands - deltree, rmdir, cd, cmd, xcop
Re: (Score:2)
PowerShell is longwinded with a bizarro Verb-Noun fixation and a heavy runtime behind it. Yes there are aliases but unfortunately those aliases suck - e.g. when you type "dir" in PowerShell it is an alias on Get-ChildItem which conspicuously not "dir" in the conventional sense and does not support the same arguments.
Would it have killed Microsoft to have written a cmdlet called Get-DosChildItem that behaved like the old command and alias to that? Same for the other commands - deltree, rmdir, cd, cmd, xcopy move, if, rename etc. - and even cmd itself. If they had done that then chances are command prompt would have gone away entirely because PowerShell would be a complete superset. They could have even written decent analogues for Unix file utils in the same way but they didn't do that either.
The only time I'll use PowerShell is when I'm forced to, when there is no other way to do something from a prompt to manage Windows. Otherwise I use a prompt which is terse and familiar and doesn't inflict verbosity or runtime complexity on me for no reason.
If that's what you want, it would not be hard to implement yourself. I concede, PowerShell syntax is a bit weird. I'm an old PERL/BASH guy, and PowerShell reminds me a bit of both, so I don't mind much. But getting a good one-liner PS command can get a little hairy.
Microsoft destroyed Powershell (Score:2)
Powershell *could have been* the best shell scripting language ever. But Microsoft destroyed it.
The core problem with scripting languages is that they rely on lexical parsing of the text output from a command. You run a command to get a list of the employees, and you know that the 3rd column of the output contains a string with the date they were hired, so you used sed and awk to skip 2 commas, then any spaces, then grab the first four digits, and now you have the year of their hire. Great! But this is di
Re: Microsoft destroyed Powershell (Score:2)
I've been a heavy PowerShell scripter since version 2.0 and managed thousands of Windows servers of every version all the way from 2000 up to the latest and greatest and doing a lot of C# direct access to the framework and usage of all the objects in the framework along with win32 direct DLL access for certain system level calls.
Prior to that I was a very heavy Batch/Command developer with natively compiled GNU/Linux Utils from GnuWin32 and then native GNU Utils commands. While at the same time writing som
Backwards (Score:2)
Powershell has been overall negative for Windows ecosystem. It is wildly different from Bash for no good reason, hard to learn, hard to use. And its invention meant that Windows GUI admin tools have not gotten any updates in decades.
Powershell makes my head ache (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, a few years ago I learned it from the ground up with a book and was able to parallelize several scripts and get their runtime down a good deal.
But the language itself is so Godawful quirky, you can get really strange results just trying to parse a string. It has potential, but I hope to never have to work with it again.
Powershell: Invented by a madman, and maintained by lunatics