The Powershell Programming Language

Published on 28 May 2018 (Updated: 28 October 2024)
The Powershell Programming Language

Welcome to the Powershell page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

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Description

PowerShell is the de facto scripting language for managing Windows machines/servers. Microsoft has made it quite clear that PowerShell is here to stay and will become the preferred way to manage Windows servers in the future.

Jeffrey Snover is largely credited as the designer behind the language, while Bruce Payette and James Truher were also on the project, and in an interview in 2017, Snover explained the motivation behind creating PowerShell:

I'd been driving a bunch of managing changes, and then I originally took the UNIX
tools and made them available on Windows, and then it just didn't work. Right?
Because there's a core architectural difference between Windows and Linux. On
Linux, everything's an ASCII text file, so anything that can manipulate that is
a managing tool. AWK, grep, sed? Happy days!

I brought those tools available on Windows, and then they didn't help manage Windows
because in Windows, everything's an API that returns structured data. So, that
didn't help. [...] I came up with this idea of PowerShell, and I said, "Hey,
we can do this better."

Originally, PowerShell was to be called Monad and it's ideas were published in a white paper titled Monad Manifesto. Shortly after releasing the Beta 3 version Microsoft formally renamed Monad to Windows PowerShell, followed by the release candidate 1 version.

PowerShell is now up to version 5.1 for stable builds and the new 6.0 version which was announced in 2016 is in public beta. The largest change in this version is it's now open-source and will now be called PowerShell Core as it runs on .NET Core as opposed to the .NET Framework which previous versions use.

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