1. It's amazing because Windows-only admins (or predominantly Windows admins with almost no Linux experience) have never seen anything like it before. Until PowerShell, the state of the art was VB scripting or batch files, both of which are (objectively) garbage. Regardless of how long the rest of us have been working with shell scripts, Python scripting, etc., Windows users have never had the opportunity to do similar things with similar tools which are included with the OS.
2. It's amazing because it does a lot of great things that even bash scripting can't do. The idea of passing around structured data can be super handy for a lot of common topics. For example, on Linux I have to use 'ip addr list' to get list of IPs, grep to get just the IPs, awk to get just the IPs, and now I have a list of IP addresses. It's a huge stupid hassle that I have to do every single time I want to write a script that takes advantage of IP addresses.
Making everything a string makes sense when it's 1970 and you want everything to be compatible, but when basically none of the tools I use on a day-to-day basis provide the option for easily machine-parse-able output, it ends up very frustrating. The (theoretical?) promise of Powershell is that all output is machine-parse-able.
The benefit of passing objects around is that you could do things like Get me a list of network interfaces | filter by interfaces which are up | which have IP addresses | just show me the IP addresses. The few examples I've seen make it feel like your shell is some sort of half-bash/half-SQL system where you can filter, process, and loop over objects.
I can't count how many shell scripts I've had to write which parse output to get the list of data I want, then go back over that same output again to do actual work on it. You can hack a lot of stuff together with ugly hacks; getting all the interfaces on a MacOS machine with IPs except loopback? Maybe 'ifconfig | egrep "^[a-z]|inet[^6]" | grep -B1 'inet' | grep '^[a-z]' | grep -v lo' would do it. In most cases. Probably there's a better way to do it, but if you just want to get something written then you can hack it in like this, or loop over 'ifconfig -lu' (which, on my machine, shows 13 'up' network interfaces), etc.
1. It's amazing because Windows-only admins (or predominantly Windows admins with almost no Linux experience) have never seen anything like it before. Until PowerShell, the state of the art was VB scripting or batch files, both of which are (objectively) garbage. Regardless of how long the rest of us have been working with shell scripts, Python scripting, etc., Windows users have never had the opportunity to do similar things with similar tools which are included with the OS.
2. It's amazing because it does a lot of great things that even bash scripting can't do. The idea of passing around structured data can be super handy for a lot of common topics. For example, on Linux I have to use 'ip addr list' to get list of IPs, grep to get just the IPs, awk to get just the IPs, and now I have a list of IP addresses. It's a huge stupid hassle that I have to do every single time I want to write a script that takes advantage of IP addresses.
Making everything a string makes sense when it's 1970 and you want everything to be compatible, but when basically none of the tools I use on a day-to-day basis provide the option for easily machine-parse-able output, it ends up very frustrating. The (theoretical?) promise of Powershell is that all output is machine-parse-able.
The benefit of passing objects around is that you could do things like Get me a list of network interfaces | filter by interfaces which are up | which have IP addresses | just show me the IP addresses. The few examples I've seen make it feel like your shell is some sort of half-bash/half-SQL system where you can filter, process, and loop over objects.
I can't count how many shell scripts I've had to write which parse output to get the list of data I want, then go back over that same output again to do actual work on it. You can hack a lot of stuff together with ugly hacks; getting all the interfaces on a MacOS machine with IPs except loopback? Maybe 'ifconfig | egrep "^[a-z]|inet[^6]" | grep -B1 'inet' | grep '^[a-z]' | grep -v lo' would do it. In most cases. Probably there's a better way to do it, but if you just want to get something written then you can hack it in like this, or loop over 'ifconfig -lu' (which, on my machine, shows 13 'up' network interfaces), etc.