I just have trouble believing that a currently developed OS (NetBSD for the record) still has this kind of opaqueness. This is a problem I will never have again when working in PowerShell!
On PowerShell all cmdlets have built-in help which can be accessed a variety of ways, the simplest of which is:
cmdlet-name -?
The more verbose versions include “help <cmdlet-name>”, and “get-help <cmdlet-name>” with increasingly higher levels of detail obtained by supplying parameters to Get-Help such as “-example”, “-detailed”, and “full”.
From a buddy who shall remain nameless:
“Ripping on NetBSD is pretty low. /most/ Unix commands use –help. Very few of them don’t, and simply don’t because they were established before standards. This is like Germany bragging that they have entirely new infrastructure and government buildings. Yeah, because every once and awhile, the rest of the world blows the old stuff up!”
I know Powerhell owes a lot to *nix and Perl for its roots. Something about standing on the backs of giants. But you really cannot claim that anything in the Unix or Linux world is all that consistent. There’s several good efforts, but nothing cohesive at the level of PowerShell.
My point is that building a new system based on a system that has evolved over decades really gives you an opportunity to start things clean and consistent. Evolution of a system leads to innovation, but generally creates a mess. Saying that a fresh implementation is more consistent isn’t a bragging point.
I would say that PowerShell’s main innovation or bragging point is that it is built around an object oriented platform.
Well said, Oh Nameless One. My post was not so much a rip on BSD as it was a contrast to “just something I came across today”. I could have chosen from a dozen other similar examples, across ALL platforms, including Microsoft’s own stuff as new as the weeks-old Server 2008.