2006-04-28 #1

*NIX and/or Java Response to MS PowerShell

The recent relase of Microsoft's PowerShell (formerly Monad) makes me wonder if the open-source community will rise to the challenge of providing something as good for *NIX, or if they will simply live in denial of MS's genuine advancement/advantage. I think that we now need to update all of our *NIX/Windows Advantage/Disadvantage tables and move the "scriptability" check to the other column.

It's not even clear that you could create something similar for *NIX. PowerShell is build on .Net so actually has lots of Objects to script, whereas an Object-based shell on *NIX would be lacking any Objects to script. Actually, UNIX is an OO system in a very limited fashion, be it one with only one interface: File.

When I had breakfast with James Gosling, I asked him if the Solaris team at Sun was doing anything with Java to add MSH-like capabilities to Solaris, and to make a long answer short, he said "no".

Many of the high-order functional programming aspects of MSH remind me of a UNIX shell from around 1990 called "Es". You can read about it here: Es: A shell with higher-order functions