PowerShell: Embrace the Pipeline Revolution

A: Alright, let’s do a quick gut check. Who here would honestly say they hate PowerShell? Don’t worry, no judgment—I’ve heard everything from ‘it’s weird’ to ‘I just don’t get it’.

B: Well…yeah, I’ll admit it. I mean, it always felt clunky, and, I dunno, just so Windows-y. Coming from bash, I always thought, why bother?

A: Fair! But what if I told you: stop parsing walls of text, and start piping real objects? No more chaining awk, grep, and cut hoping columns line up. Imagine working with structured data every step of the way.

B: Wait, objects…like, the output isn’t just lines of text? I can grab properties and filter without playing regex ninja?

A: Exactly. And that’s just the beginning. The PowerShell you remember? Windows-only, stuck in IT—forget it. PowerShell 7 and up runs everywhere: Windows, Mac, Linux. It’s open-source, and mixes with bash tools when you need to.

B: Hold on, you’re saying I could actually run PowerShell on my Mac? And call, like, git or jq from inside a script?

A: Absolutely. Need Python? Docker? AWS CLI? Stitch them together—each returns objects or output you can wrangle straight away. PowerShell doesn’t wall you off; it’s glue for modern workflows.

B: But what about speed? People always say it’s slow or clunky…

A: For interactive admin tasks? The ergonomics are tuned for clarity. Sure, it’s not for number crunching or huge ETL jobs, but for orchestration, it’s fast and expressive. Plus, it’s got batteries included: parallelism, test frameworks like Pester, packaging, remoting—it’s more than just a shell.

B: Hmm. So, no more fighting to parse JSON or wrangle API responses?

A: Right—Invoke-RestMethod hands you parsed JSON as objects, ready to filter. Want to see some real scripts in action? Check out demo files like 01_objects_vs_text.ps1 for objects beating out text, or 02_json_rest.ps1 for real API calls.

B: Alright, you’ve got my attention. But this sounds big—if I wanted to actually try one thing tomorrow, where should I start?

A: Simple. Replace just one grep or awk chain with a tiny PowerShell filter. Or try grabbing a REST API with Invoke-RestMethod, filter with Where-Object. And if you’re feeling bold? Run 05_pester_example.Tests.ps1—bake in tests so you trust your scripts.

B: That’s…surprisingly doable. Maybe PowerShell isn’t just that clunky Windows thing after all.