It could be so much worse
This is the year when external powers force this smelly 20-years-of-Linux admin to learn PowerShell on Windows, and I think it could be much worse. PowerShell 2.0 was mostly atrocious, but from 3.0 on things have been solidifying and you don't even have to go to W32_ every 3 lines of code to accomplish things anymore.
I was wary and expected a shoddy thing, but when I started to use it I was surprised how much you can accomplish with this in a halfway legible fashion that perhaps even your team mates can decipher. The only nasty surprise was that piping things from one cmdlet to the other can reveal *more* information in the data that's piped. "Oh, so we're piping objects, not text?". Yeah, duh, apparently we are.
I struggle to think how they could abstract away the underlying OS, though. I'm writing a lot of Windowsisms, there's no way this code would run unchanged on Linux, but maybe that's not the point of an open source PowerShell anyway. Anyhoo. More FOSS is never wrong.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
