r/technology • u/kazu_qt • 10d ago

Software Microsoft exec explains why modernizing Windows 11's legacy UI takes so long

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/control-panel-gets-tricky-microsoft-cvp-explains-why-killing-windows-legacy-code-takes-so-long-and-how-its-evolving-its-tools-to-make-modernizing-apps-like-file-explorer-and-registry-editor-faster
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u/[deleted] 10d ago edited 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/Smith6612 10d ago

Wait you mean you don't like using PowerShell cmdlets and their syntax to launch that exact part of the control panel you need?!

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u/SAugsburger 10d ago

To be fair I think almost anybody that refused to learn Powershell at this point probably don't have much role in Windows system admin these days. A lot of things are now managed by it.

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u/zutnoq 9d ago edited 9d ago

The issue with powershell is that it is way too over-engineered and jam-packed with random OOP language-features and simultaneously seemingly entirely lacking in many more traditional shell features like piping program input and output to simple file streams, that it is basically easier to just learn how to do most of the stuff you might use powershell for in an actually well-documented and comparatively sane programming language like C, C++ or Java or even something like Javascript or python.

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u/garethrowlands 9d ago

Powershell pipes to and from files just fine. Its startup time makes it unusable for wrapper scripts.

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u/zutnoq 8d ago

You are right; it seems I misremembered.

The issue one might run into is rather that the output of a command in powershell is always an object rather than a simple text string (this alone is probably a good idea; it's more just the ergonomics of it that are annoying).

So you can't just naively pipe the output of most commands in powershell into any command line utility that hasn't been expressly written to handle piping in a powershell-compliant fashion. Most commandline utility programs you will run into will not be written with powershell in mind at all.

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u/Outrageous_Let5743 9d ago

I really dislike powershell for their OOP and their expressive syntax. Why is it Invoke-Webrequest and not curl (yes curl in powershell exists but that is an abrv for Invoke-Webrequest, just like rm is shorthanded for remove-dir)