I tried PowerShell, hated it. The idea of manipulating objects instead of text streams is interesting, and avoids most of the footguns sh/bash have, but you also lose in flexibility.

One reason is that there are thousands of command line tools in the UNIX ecosystem that process text streams and are designed to work with shells like bash. You have much less options when you are processing PowerShell objects.

Note: I think the first thing I tried to do in PowerShell was a script that scanned a directory recursively for files containing a CRC in their name, and then check it, or something along these lines. After several hours of trying, I simply couldn't do it while it was relatively straightforward in bash, even with spaces in file names.

And that's not that I like UNIX shell scripting, in fact I hate it, so many footguns, that's why I wanted to try PowerShell, but it didn't fit my needs.

I feel like powershell hides too much to be used regularly. I have a dozen of small shellscripts and aliases to do basically what PS help me to do when i work on windows (and some), but at least i know how it work behind.

I had to work with Sencha/ExtJS early 2010. It was the same feeling. Yes, it is powerfull, but too much magic happen for something without a clear orientation (at the time, now it is used for data loaded frontend i think). PS i don't understand what it wants me to do.

The language is fine. The interface is now fine, but in 2015 it was the shittiest tty available on modern computers. It's okay since at least early 2021 (when i restarted using windows). I know it should be reasonably better, but i wouldn't trust any PS script written before 2021 to run on my workstation. I run bash scripts i wrote when i started coding.

Still, if you're new to the gig and don't care about free software and commons, you should learn PS (unless you want to work on baremetal or on MC, in this case, bash will be enough).

"Primitive" seems like the wrong word to apply. A modern Python programmer (a common example) might think that anything not OOP is archaic. But OOP is just one design pattern. And... it can easily lead to over-engineering and delight in the pattern per se.

Bash, awk, grep et alii don't do OOP. But they are close to the data and are powerful.

Compaints about the notation of these tools (e.g. "line noise") are becoming silly now that we've seen the appearance of some Powershell and Python statements. Any non-trivial notation will have to make choices. ^_^

They don't feel primitive, they are primitive.

sh and bash feel a lot more sane and reasonable after learning some PowerShell. PowerShell is mostly not-a-shell.