About ninety percent of the world’s population is right-handed. Microsoft is concerned about them of course; but hasn’t forgotten the other ten percent. As part of their diversity and inclusion program, Microsoft has announced plans to roll out a left-handed version of PowerShell.
Science knows that left-handed individuals tend to favor their left hands for writing, grasping, or otherwise working with objects. The PowerShell team figures that has to mean lefties process information in a significantly different fashion than righties. Why do they think that? They just do.
Kaitlyn Shepherd, project team lead, believes that the cerebellum’s serial processing ‘triage center’ favors inputs from the motor cortex (as opposed to the basal ganglia). The logical conclusion she said, is that left-handers have sharply lower neuroplasticity in both the parietal and occipital lobes.
As a result, Microsoft feels it’s critical to make PowerShell inclusive to everyone; even if it means turning things a bit inside out. How is it different? Cmdlets will contain the same verbs and nouns, but from there it’s a new ballgame. How, you ask? Here are a few examples:
Get-VM becomes VM-Get
Add-VMHardDiskDrive becomes HardDiskDriveVM-Add
New-PSSessionConfigurationFile becomes PSConfigurationFileSession-New
Arguments to cmdlets maintain their current syntax with no changes.
To facilitate communications about the different versions, the PowerShell team is proposing the following naming conventions. Standard PowerShell will soon be known as Right-Handed PowerShell, or RHPS (say ‘rips’). Left-Handed PowerShell, will be shortened to LHPS (say ‘lips’).
By now the astute reader will have wondered “What about PowerShell automation?” That’s a great question says Shepherd. She says in the new version, scripts can handle LHPS or RHPS.
As spokesman Kevin Sinish put it “We’ve had left handed mouse options for decades. It’s time we offered left handed options for the mind.”
