Even before PowerShell, Windows had thousands of COM objects in the system that can invoked within a scripting language like .vbs or any language that has APIs for accessing com objects like ActiveState perl. The Windows Explorer shell, Windows Media Player, not to mention Microsoft Office applications, have object models that are exposed and available to programmed against. I am not so sure that UNIX has anything better, since it seems all the functionality that UNIX has is also available in Windows. Then, there is also WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) objects for all the low-level system operations.
I'd just like to add to this that *nix developers don't appreciate COM for what it really added to windows.
In Linux you only generally call C functions from higher level languages (and sometimes C++). Python programmers use python libraries and sometimes C libraries. Ruby programmers use ruby libraries and sometimes C libraries.
Never will you see someone calling in to a Ruby library from a Python program.
On windows via COM you get Perl calling in to C++ calling in to C# calling in to VB.NET.
Comments
Even before PowerShell, Windows had thousands of COM objects in the system that can invoked within a scripting language like .vbs or any language that has APIs for accessing com objects like ActiveState perl. The Windows Explorer shell, Windows Media Player, not to mention Microsoft Office applications, have object models that are exposed and available to programmed against. I am not so sure that UNIX has anything better, since it seems all the functionality that UNIX has is also available in Windows. Then, there is also WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) objects for all the low-level system operations.
I'd just like to add to this that *nix developers don't appreciate COM for what it really added to windows.
In Linux you only generally call C functions from higher level languages (and sometimes C++). Python programmers use python libraries and sometimes C libraries. Ruby programmers use ruby libraries and sometimes C libraries.
Never will you see someone calling in to a Ruby library from a Python program.
On windows via COM you get Perl calling in to C++ calling in to C# calling in to VB.NET.