If anyone from MS-PWSH team reads this, I'd love for y'all to add some basic GUI functionality that doesn't involve me having to write a bunch of .NET. I'm sorry, but the reason I like PWSH in the first place is it's a simple dynamic language with lots of easy to use commands that I can chain together. I'd love to have a new set of cmdlets for creating simple user interfaces and charts.
For example, something like the below would be so simple for Microsoft to add to the product and remove a page of boilerplate code that I don't really understand well.
There are probably users in the millions that are ok at the basics of programming, but don't have the job role to where tools like Java or C# make sense. Python is usually a good fit here, but I really wish Microsoft had something written for us common folks and not just server admins and IT folks.
If Microsoft put some more effort into PWSH to where it wasn't turtle slow at things like parsing files and then started adding things like what I talk about above. Maybe even cmdlets for statistics and science...it could be something pretty amazing that your typical business analyst could quickly use to build some really amazing software to do their job better or a prototype for the software team to actually implement in a more robust manner. It's such a really cool technology that has a lot of missing potential IMO.
It seems like Microsoft assumes that the three options are full software developer with C#, IT stuff with PWSH, or Excel for the business folks. Excel is really great in a lot of ways, but it is also pretty limited and VBA+Excel is one of the most limited ecosystems I've dealt with. I guess third party languages like Python, R, and so on make for another fourth option, but sometimes I wish Microsoft had spent more time in this area.
There are some third party tools like PowerShell Pro tools or PowerShell Ultimate (https://ironmansoftware.com/). I appreciate they cost, but if you are a builder of tools for others, they really can help massively!
Thanks for the link. Yeah , I was aware of this one and another GUI builder someone sells, but it just really seems like something MS should provide as built-in. The ability to share a script to any windows computer without them having to download anything (exception being an old copy of Windows) and just run a program is an important piece in my eyes.
TCL itself is very similar to PS in being a command based language, but it's a little weirder in some ways. It's nice and lightweight, but doesn't work with Windows as natively as PS, although I bet there are some COM or other libraries that can get you close.
The TK GUI is indeed lightweight, but a bit antiquated. I was thinking of something closer to Rebol, but maybe with a GUI builder as building a GUI with just Rebol syntax (although crazy powerful - Tetris is less than a page of code in Rebol) is a little challenging.
The main thing though is neither TCL or PS or Rebol covers everything I think is needed in a modern business analyst programming language. You need a simple dynamic language, ease of sharing programs, reasonable performance, really good OS interop, ease of building GUI, and a very large ecosystem of tools. Python is by far the closest here and is the programming language of choice for those in this segment for a good reason.
A query language? I don't think that's what I'm referring to at all if I found the right links. Business users can use SQL quite easily and tools like Powershell or Python make automating that easy.
How is that relevant to my suggestion to have PWSH add in cmdlets for everything from GUI to chart/graphs, to adding scientific/numerical commands as well? I was talking about a general solution and not just graphs for my queries if that makes sense. I appreciate the suggestion though!
For example, something like the below would be so simple for Microsoft to add to the product and remove a page of boilerplate code that I don't really understand well.
Create-Chart -Type "Bar" -XAxis $Cities -YAxis $GDP -OutputFile "C:/Documents/ProjectAnalysis/CitiesBarGraph.png"
There are probably users in the millions that are ok at the basics of programming, but don't have the job role to where tools like Java or C# make sense. Python is usually a good fit here, but I really wish Microsoft had something written for us common folks and not just server admins and IT folks.
If Microsoft put some more effort into PWSH to where it wasn't turtle slow at things like parsing files and then started adding things like what I talk about above. Maybe even cmdlets for statistics and science...it could be something pretty amazing that your typical business analyst could quickly use to build some really amazing software to do their job better or a prototype for the software team to actually implement in a more robust manner. It's such a really cool technology that has a lot of missing potential IMO.
It seems like Microsoft assumes that the three options are full software developer with C#, IT stuff with PWSH, or Excel for the business folks. Excel is really great in a lot of ways, but it is also pretty limited and VBA+Excel is one of the most limited ecosystems I've dealt with. I guess third party languages like Python, R, and so on make for another fourth option, but sometimes I wish Microsoft had spent more time in this area.