this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I think the only reason Windows users are afraid of terminals is that they're not used to them. They're not that bad. Most terminal programs have a -(-)help command that shows you what you can do as well, in case you get stuck.
I do think there is another reason, which is that the Windows CMD is awful. If that's your only reference, I understand not wanting to learn it.
Powershell is pretty interesting but I haven't learnt much of it and it's hard to discover commands, arguments and fields within results. All the commands have really similar generic names and cryptic mnemonics. And an annoying amount of them are text based and don't actually interoperate with the ecosystem.
I'm more used to slinging around text with bash and the basic Linux utilities so I'm not inclined to learn more than I have to on the Windows side.
I wrote a couple hundred lines of it as part of my apprenticeship a few years ago and have occasionally needed to deal with small scripts since then.
In principle, I like the idea of static typing, as I'm a backend dev, but yeah, I don't particularly want a script to ever become large enough where static typing truly becomes useful.
I would strongly recommend using a full-fledged programming language instead. In particular, because Microsoft somehow managed to make Powershell feel even more verbose than even C#, which is one of the most unnecessarily verbose languages out there.
Back then, it also felt quite like a web technology, where many features were only available, if you had the right version combination of Windows, Powershell and .NET installed.
And of course, the biggest strength of Bash is unattainable, which is that there's multiple decades of people posting snippets and example commands online.
Having said all that, maybe for Ops folks, who *have* to script a Windows configuration and aren't proficient in any proper programming languages, it is genuinely quite useful.
How is that different from being afraid of terminals?
It's not like you have to learn everything there is to it at once, you know.
I am a huge noob in the terminal, but --help, man, and basic knowledge about things like grep and pipes make me look like a wizard sometimes.
Let me tell you a story of checking a signature and unzipping an exercise file for uni every week on my linux distro that was named 01_ML-exercise_Bayesian-sep.zip.gpg followed by 02-Ml-exercise-FisherLinearDiscriminant.zip.gpg