PowerShell is great for when you want to interact with Windows APIs (local and remote) and/or work with objects. I have no problem with using it for those purposes.
But terminals and the tooling around them have always revolved around text. My point is that since Microsoft is (a) including OpenSSH, (b) upgrading their terminal infrastructure to support VT100 and ANSI codes, and (c) investing in WSL, it would make make a lot of sense to add a Windows-native shell that is more text-oriented. Not because I hate working with objects and APIs, but because plain text ought to be the primary, first-class supported data format when working on a terminal.
PowerShell is great, but it's an object-oriented (not text-oriented) shell.
> But terminals and the tooling around them have always revolved around text
That's because they're from the 70s, when literal terminals with no real computing power were connected to a centralized system that did all the work. They're archaic and silly.
They may seem that way to some, but they still provide a surprisingly versatile and useful user interface. Terminal programs and scripts are easy and fast to write, easy to interact with, easy to change, and trivially portable across POSIX platforms; hence, when writing a tool for oneself or another developer, most developers will usually opt for a CLI-based UI. Terminal program UIs are also very stable (in addition to being text-based), making them arbitrarily composable into scripts and workflows without fear of them breaking in the future.
Modern graphical UIs are usually easy to use, but they are far-removed from the code and tools that are used to write them or interact with their APIs programmatically. Terminal program UIs, however, are very close to the environment they're built in -- so the line between using a terminal program and interacting with it programmatically is delightfully blurred.
I use a multi-paned iTerm2/zsh window every day as a front-end developer (I'm on a Mac running macOS Mojave). I can't imagine working without it. There are a lot of good reasons npm, git, and other popular mainstays in modern development workflows are terminal-based.
Terminal is not the same thing as CLI or TUI. I don't have a problem with either of the latter interfaces, I have a problem with archaic emulation of long obsolete hardware with in-band signaling.
A modern console would use out of band signaling for things like cursor position, colors, size changes, etc. Windows consoles work like that using API calls, which is perhaps not ideal for quickly hacking things together but at least doesn't wig out on you if something throws arbitrary bytes into the stream.
But terminals and the tooling around them have always revolved around text. My point is that since Microsoft is (a) including OpenSSH, (b) upgrading their terminal infrastructure to support VT100 and ANSI codes, and (c) investing in WSL, it would make make a lot of sense to add a Windows-native shell that is more text-oriented. Not because I hate working with objects and APIs, but because plain text ought to be the primary, first-class supported data format when working on a terminal.
PowerShell is great, but it's an object-oriented (not text-oriented) shell.