Need some description up front, not in the 5th section ("Philosophy" https://github.com/nushell/nushell#philosophy). Some ideas:
"powershell for unix", "structured pipes", "pre-parsed text", "small, useful, typed tools loosely coupled."
powershell for unix is ... powershell: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/instal...
PowerShell from Microsoft is looking too alien on Unix. Just looking at the syntax I already feel uncomfortable.
It's hard for me to criticize it because I haven't used it, but it looks like it was designed by a committee and overdesigned. I.e. it wasn't created from the need, like someone at Microsoft wanted to automate his work and created PS to solve his problem. It looks like some boss decided: "They have shells, so we should have it also. But we will make it much cooler. So, let's gather a committee of 500 of our best managers and let's decide what features it should have".
It looks artificial and inconvenient to me unlike Unix shells. Maybe I'm wrong. But I'm pretty sure that even syntax of PS makes it harder to type the commands. Unix commands are very short (many are 2-4 letters long), all lowercase and do not contain characters which are hard to type (e.g. `-`).
PowerShell was started by a single person, Microsoft's Jeffrey Snover. As the project progressed other designers came on board but Snover remained (and remains) as Chief Architect. The design-by-committee allegation isn't being fair to him.
Part of why PowerShell may seem not quite Unix-like, is Snover didn't just look at Unix as an influence. Snover's professional background included experience with IBM OS/400's CL shell and OpenVMS's DCL, and his experience with both systems influenced PowerShell's design.
Once you start using PWSH, the design decisions are so obvious and make so much sense, that it is obvious Jeffrey Snover did have vast experience with variety of shells and languages.
The idea to tie it with .NET and COM+ on windows is the best a shell has ever done, though someone noted in another thread that it is an old idea from XEROX mainframes (not sure what the name was).
if you want to imagine this in terms of unix/linux - it would be something like having all libraries' APIs at disposal directly from a shell that passes structured objects. or python's REPL being more shell-usable or JVM having a shell that provides access to all classes in a click of ENTER.
major downside of pwsh is that you can feel it being slower than expected due to the way objects are passed around, but I really expect this will be solved at some point with future releases as PWSH as language is still being developed so some concepts and internal architecture decisions perhaps change a lot.
noshell is taking this idea to a fair level, but really, there is a reason to do some dev/devops work in PWSH because it will heavily impact all future shell development even if eventually superseded by something better.