I haven't met a single person who likes PowerShell. It's perhaps the textbook example of ugly design that looks technically consistent but utterly unfriendly and mind bogglingly verbose. I am not saying Windows command line is great or bash is best, but at least those things are designed for humans at certain extent. I have written few ps scripts and virtually every line, every step, every task almost always required googling. I don't know anything about Snover but my image of PowerShell designer was someone who couldn't write more sophisticated parser and compensated that lack of skills and creativity to solve fundamental challenges in designing OO shell by offloading complexity and unfriendlyness on users. Basically just reverse of Steve Jobs.

It was aweful when PowerShell team tried to shove their ugly creation down people's throats by removing Shift+right click menu for "Command prompt here" by "PowerShell here". Not a sign of good product when you have to force it upon people. The designers of this thing should have been demoted, let alone making them "Distinguished Engineer".

While I'm sure that's partly sampling bias. The truth is, Powershell has a lot of flaws. Both in the program itself, as well a the language decisions.

And I _REALLY_ like the idea of an object-oriented piping system. I would love to have that built into Linux/bash/etc instead of every program having to have some sort of "human readable" mode and (if you're lucky) a "machine readable" mode. Except every machine readable mode is different and still requires a parsing pass to get it filtered into your program correctly. I find it fun and even relaxing to design parsing passes to bring say, smem, into a Python script. But that's because (Thank God) I don't have to do it for a living. [And the newest era of "some" programs supporting JSON or XML output but there's still no easy tools for filtering through it into the next program--requiring yet another translation layer.]

Now back to Powershell. It's fun to learn the first day. And then after that, it's just an 80 degree walk uphill after you learn one stupid idea after another. You want to do something insanely simple in concept and you're pouring through ours of documentation and examples for the exact use-case.

Personally, I've started using Python2/3 for scripts lately. Most systems I use already have Python, and Python is easily 10x-100x faster in many situations and that's not even using a compiled variant. And while I enjoy C variant programming, Python is still a huge step up from all those stupid Bash idiosyncrasies like string -eq non-string but wait, you added a space before the equals, so it explodes anyway. (I can't remember a great example off-the-top-of-my-head, but anyone who has used Bash has had those days of an obscure error being related to a single incorrect whitespace.)

A much more lightweight approach is to exchange structured data. This can even be easily done on top of existing byte streams, just standardizing the format.

FreeBSD started adopting this approach via libxo for its base utilities: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo. I hope it spreads into Linux.