Mark Leighton Fisher

At first I was excited that Microsoft had created PowerShell -- a usable command-line shell for Windows. (I always have 4 Cygwin Bash windows up on my XP PC at work, and before Cygwin got stable I ran the MKS Toolkit version of the Korn Shell.)

Once I started using Powershell, I quickly became disappointed. There wasn't anything in PowerShell that I wanted to do that did not exist in an easily-consumable form in Perl. That would have been acceptable -- if it hadn't been for how slow PowerShell was compared to Perl or Cygwin Bash. As someone whose bread'n'butter for several years has been .NET programming, I am still not sure why PowerShell is so much slower than Perl or Bash (if anyone knows, please tell me). (I don't have problems getting a sane level of performance out of .NET.)

After those experiences, I still would have tried using PowerShell but something held me back. It finally occurred to me one day -- using PowerShell is like passing hashes in Perl. The syntax is sweeter in PowerShell (blah.foo.bar instead of blah->{"foo"}->{"bar"}) but the net effect (pun intended) and the mental process is the same -- create the hierarchy of references by name. PowerShell is just not sweet enough to lure me into using it (and yes, I am still also talking about how slow PowerShell is).

I still use PowerShell from time to time instead of cmd.exe, but until I see a compelling story as to why I should invest more time in PowerShell, I am sticking exclusively with Perl for my glue programming.