[tacticalogic]

when Microsoft finally sh*tcans the NT codebase and puts the Windows GUI over Unix

That would be a monumental task. There's a hell of a lot more to Microsoft's codebase than Windows.

What do you think the chances are that somebody over at Apple is busy porting Powershell to OSX?

[dayglored]

> What do you think the chances are that somebody over at Apple is busy porting Powershell to OSX?

I'd think.... zero. OS-X has six major flavors of the Bourne and Csh families of Unix shells already, any of which are at least as capable as Powershell:

% cat /etc/shells
/bin/bash
/bin/csh
/bin/ksh
/bin/sh
/bin/tcsh
/bin/zsh

Powershell is great on a Windows box, I agree. But only because COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE were the only native alternatives until it appeared. Granted all shells have their strengths and weaknesses. But overall, Powershell is 20 years behind the times. They should have supplied that as a baseline part of Windows 3.1, and been expanding on it since.

[dayglored]

>> when Microsoft finally sh*tcans the NT codebase and puts the Windows GUI over Unix

> That would be a monumental task. There's a hell of a lot more to Microsoft's codebase than Windows.

Quite true.

It is widely acknowledged even at Microsoft that no one knows the internal structure of the NT codebase any more. It grew like Topsy over two decades, and is a huge mess, architecturally. When they change one part of it, things break in other parts that should have no interrelationship, yet are interdependent in poorly understood (or unknown) ways. This is why it's so difficult to manage the development of the OS -- nobody anywhere REALLY knows all of what happens when you change parts of it. This was one of the key reasons why the NT6 (Vista) development took so long and had to be repurposed to produce NT6.1 (Win7).

By comparison, the internals of Unix are well-understood by thousands of experienced programmers around the world, and changes are made in a fairly straightforward and predictable fashion. That's how it was possible for Apple to graft the Mac GUI over Unix in only a few years, and have the result be stable and relatively simple. They knew that the old Apple MacOS had reached the end of its usefulness, and chucked it. Microsoft needs to do the same with NT, painful as it is -- graft the Windows GUI over Unix and proceed into the future instead of constantly being held back by past errors.

The argument of back-compatibility with MS-DOS and old versions of Windows became moot a few years ago with the rise of mobile devices. Business apps based on Win2K and WinXP are migrated into VMs now. Microsoft needs to move into the present immediately, and prepare for the future.