When developers claim that bugs are intentional I think it lowers people’s respect for them, and for all software developers, and lowers expectations for software (which is saying something). How about if I put it this way: it’s one thing to say “we could not find a way to make that case work and still handle everything else we need to handle,” or even: “we didn’t have time to finish that yet, and we’ve prioritized other things” ... but it’s another thing to say “we meant to do that.”

Declaring something to be “by design” sounds like “we meant to do that” and we really need to avoid it unless we can provide an explanation that will convince the user that our design is better than what they are asking for.

I agree with the fact that the “by design” excuse is abused. However, because loose typing is often the cause of many frustrating bugs, and because typing the argument as Int32 does work as intended, I’d say the issue isn’t that bad. The bottom line is, when you don’t specify types, life is like a box of chocolates…you never know what you’re gonna git.

There are too many exclamation signs everywhere about PowerShell. The technology itself is awesome, but implementation quality and responsibility for what is done is low too often. Meantime one has to be a rocket scientist to able to use this shell for file system or registry operations. I am talking about real jobs, not trivial demos that work sometimes.

Thanks,
Roman Kuzmin

PS > function test-numericparam ($42) { “$42” }
PS > test-numericparam -42
-42
PS > test-numericparam -42 Foo
-42