Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Monad Manifesto – A Blast from the Past

I was looking today for some information about PowerShell (details on modules if you must know!), and I came across a very old Blog Posting by Jeffrey Snover. Entitled “Monad Manifesto – the origin of Windows PowerShell”, there’s also an 18-page white paper dated August 8 2002 entitled Monad Manifesto.

With the New Year just ahead, this old paper makes great reading. Of course, as the blog post points out, this is not an official white paper and it’s no longer very accurate (and shows the very old syntax that we had in the early versions of MSH). But as a vision, writen in 2002, this paper is required reading.

It’s interesting that it’s taken nearly 6.5 years from that paper to CTP3, and we’re still 6-9 months (or more) away from V2 RTW/RTM. I’ve always sort of thought the pace of development in PowerShell was fairly quick. As the Grateful Dead sing: “What a long, strange trip it’s been”.

Happy new year – and best wishes for 2009.

1 comment:

jsnover said...

I reread that about a year ago and was delighted at both how accurate the vision was and how it correctly articulates the work we still have to do.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx