PowerShell Readability For Others

Intro

I've been meaning to start some sort of online blog to jot down snippets, ideas, and solutions to begin giving back to the online community I regularly benefit from. Here is my first short post to begin that journey!

The Great Debate

I work on a team of 6 developers that write automated solutions. We are currently a little divided in our preferred languages with a heavier focus on Python. Unfortunately, I'm the PowerShell guy that has been slowly learning Python to support different projects and our overall code base.

I've been having a debate with myself over the past couple weeks. Do I go out of my way to make my PowerShell more readable or stick to the syntax I've learned and are more comfortable writing?

Can You Read This Now?

Here is a quick example with a method used very frequently: piping to Where-Object to perform operations based on an object property value.

This is the way I'm used to writing my code:

Get-NetworkAdapter | Where-Object {$_.NetConnectionID -eq "NIC1"}

For anyone familiar with PowerShell, this probably makes perfect sense. However, on my team this presents an initial roadblock concerning readability.

Based on a poll I sent out, they seemed more familiar/comfortable when the same command was presented this way:

Get-NetworkAdapter | Where NetConnectionID -eq "NIC1"

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think our decision is going to come down to what works best for our team. I'm fine to give a little, as some of the syntax of PowerShell is quite different than Python. However, I will also be challenging them to invest some time learning PowerShell as I learn Python :)

Let me know what you think in the comments. I may later turn this into a series about our team adventure to being a multi-language group.

Thanks for reading!