The essay "Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s" [1] by James Hague is appropriate here. See also The UNIX-HATERS Handbook; much of it is outdated, but I think some of it is still relevant, particularly the part on the shortcomings of pipelines.
I think it's unfortunate that even if a good open-source PowerShell clone is developed (or PowerShell itself is open-sourced), it will probably never gain widespread acceptance outside of Microsoft shops. Tribalism so often trumps actual merit. But if someone did a PowerShell-like thing on top of Node.js, I could see that taking off, particularly if it were integrated with the Atom editor and its package manager.
"node.js" termkit, which is what partially inspired the current article.
I think the problem is there is no authoritative backing for anything on the linux side, with windows, if you are going to make a object-aware-pipes tool, its going to be powershell without a doubt. In linuxland, the decision is not so clear (does one implement their own? go with termkit? go with pash? go with one of the other more deviant shells?)
> it will probably never gain widespread acceptance outside of Microsoft shops.
This seems fairly natural for something so deeply coupled with .NET.
Perhaps mono and Microsofts current efforts will make this less of a constraint, but still -- .NET has made some deep architectural tradeoffs that you will mostly have to live with if you want to play in this particular sandbox, and I can't see that helping with wider spread acceptance.
I think it's unfortunate that even if a good open-source PowerShell clone is developed (or PowerShell itself is open-sourced), it will probably never gain widespread acceptance outside of Microsoft shops. Tribalism so often trumps actual merit. But if someone did a PowerShell-like thing on top of Node.js, I could see that taking off, particularly if it were integrated with the Atom editor and its package manager.
[1]: http://prog21.dadgum.com/74.html