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Microsoft PowerShell Goes Open Source and Lands On Linux and Mac (pcworld.com)
Microsoft announced on Thursday that it is open sourcing PowerShell, its system administration, scripting, and configuration management tool that has been a default part of Windows for several years. The company says it will soon release PowerShell on Mac and Linux platforms. PCWorld reports: The company is also releasing alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Ubuntu, Centos and Redhat) and Mac OS X. A new PowerShell GitHub page gives people the ability to download binaries of the software, as well as access to the app's source code. PowerShell on Linux and Mac will let people who have already built proficiency with Microsoft's scripting language take those skills and bring them to new platforms. Meanwhile, people who are used to working on those platforms will have access to a new and very powerful tool for getting work done. It's part of Microsoft's ongoing moves to open up products that the company has previously kept locked to platforms that it owned. The company's open sourcing of its .NET programming frameworks in 2014 paved the way for this launch, by making the building blocks of PowerShell available on Linux and OS X. By making PowerShell available on Linux, Microsoft has taken the skills of Windows administrators who are already used to the software, and made them more marketable. It has also made it possible for hardcore Linux users to get access to an additional set of tools that they can use to manage a variety of systems.
It is SO "systemd". More of the binary is better bullshit.
Hint: computers work in binary.
Users work in alphanumeric strings.
Computers are fast, users are slow. Letting the computer represent data in a manner that avoids conversions between external data to/from internal data avoids a lot of unnecessary computation.
The shell is the point of interaction between the user and the computer. The computer is fast. Very fast compared to the user. The computer can afford to spend a couple extra cycles to format output for the user and translate input from the user in the space between a user's keystrokes.