I love the idea behind PowerShell, but the verbosity turns me off.
PowerShell, of course, has the pipelines but also COM integration, which is a big deal for Windows (you can script "the desktop" via COM; for instance you could create a new instance of Microsoft Word and call objects inside Word to do something to a document.)
Unix has dbus and some similar things, but nothing quite so critical as COM is to Windows.
The verbosity is one of PowerShell's best features. There is so much less guess work about what a command or argument does, or whether it is '-a' or '-A', or any of that garbage. You can usually guess how to do things because there's a reasonable consistency to the Verb-Noun structure. The extra typing is mitigated by everything being tab-complete including commands, arguments, and even variables. Not to mention you can just alias commonly used commands into shorter versions anyway!
Did I mention it also makes readings scripts at least 100 times easier?
Around the time powershell came out I got into the (bad) habit of writing super-concise bash scripts that write bash scripts, for instance:
ls *.txt | awk '{print "mv" $1 "/somewhere/"}' | bash
You're really not supposed to do this because if your character escaping is less than perfect somebody can corrupt the bash script that your script writes (like SQL injection) but it is so much fun...
One could build a UNIX distribution that would feel exactly like those Xerox PARC experiences, on top of DBUs/gRPC and a couple of managed languages of choice, but it is a project doomed to failure thanks fragmentation.
Maybe the closest one gets of it are GNOME, XFCE and KDE based distributions.
Although broading the view a bit, macOS has XPC/Open Scripting Architecture and ChromeOS/Android/Fuschia have their Binder infrastructure.
I love the idea behind PowerShell, but the verbosity turns me off.
PowerShell, of course, has the pipelines but also COM integration, which is a big deal for Windows (you can script "the desktop" via COM; for instance you could create a new instance of Microsoft Word and call objects inside Word to do something to a document.)
Unix has dbus and some similar things, but nothing quite so critical as COM is to Windows.