Ever wondered why Microsoft didn't just make a bash-compatible shell? It's not like they couldn't - it's that they don't want. It would make it easier for people to jump ship, after all. And that's something they hope to prevent.
[1]: Yeah, yeah, there's a PS port to Unix land, but no sane human being will seriously use that. It's pretty much just another waste of time to save people from their mistake of investing into a proprietary tool tied to a proprietary environment.
These jumps in "technology" are perhaps forward, but also very much backward. I've seen it time and time again with clients who have bought a new computer and had to deal with growing pains (and hatred) of the blue globe, ribbons, and other 'we changed the gui to make it hard to do what you previously did easily'.
At least in the Linux world, your knowledge isn't decimated on an update. There may be depreciations, but those are rarer than MS "we update the world'.
It's funny that this should come up in a thread about PowerShell, a replacement shell Microsoft released 6 years ago which still hasn't supplanted cmd.exe (which itself is based on syntax from the late 70s).
I'm still using them 22 years later. They still work in most Windows applications and all MS applications even though they're not listed. They could easily have taken them out since Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V have been standard in Windows for so long, but they didn't.
I also got quite comfortable with using F2 and F4 to edit my previous DOS command, which still work in Command Prompt. And since Command Prompt now has tab completion and copy and paste, I don't really feel the need to add a bash-style command history. In fact I can never remember the bash equivalent of some of the cmd history shortcuts I use.
I have, however, installed the GOW package (see bmatzelle on github) for grep, less, wc etc at the command prompt. grep is so much faster than the MS equivalent "find" it's not funny, e.g. I just searched for a 9-digit number across 13 files containing 4 million lines (158MB) and grep took 1 second; find took 57.
[1]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SigningPowerShellScripts.aspx
It also isn't a drop in replacement for the command prompt. They exist as two separate programs, instead of the Unix general Terminal and shells run inside.
In my experience, Powershell has a lot of potential but is hampered by clunky interfaces and the lack of a true robust security system across the OS. Add on top of that the large malware industry around Windows, Powershell is basically a non-starter as a replacement for the vanilla command prompt.
"At least in the Linux world, your knowledge isn't decimated on an update."
Of course, so that's why the time I put into learning how LILO worked is now paying off so greatly! Oh no wait it doesn't, because LILO went the way of the dodo (as far as I can tell, I don't use Linux all that often any more). Wait, all that time I used to spend on manually insmod'ing kernel modules to get my audio to work with the various audio systems, that has paid off! Hmm no, that too is a crapshoot that changes every year or so. Config file format? Different between all programs. Desktop integration? Different desktop systems, who each change how they work every 2 or 3 years. Gfx card drivers? Depends on the brand, make and (if you're lucky) distro. Networking setup? Lol, don't get me started.
Of course things like config files change, but unix remains one of the most backwards compatible platforms to build anything on.
