It was a mistake to quit shipping computers and operating systems without even one hobbyist-oriented programming environment preinstalled & featured.
Even a dialect of BASIC, picking up where 8-bit ROM BASICs, GW-BASIC, and QBASIC left off, & much more discoverable & tinker-able than the WSH/VBScript buried deep in every version of Windows since 98, would've been an improvement.
At least then, explorers & would-be hobbyists would have options instantly more viable than the slop machine plague.
I stand corrected. The 32-bit Windows versions had Edit.com, but the 64-bit versions didn't. However, starting with 25H2, Windows 11 *does* have a remade and open source text editor named Edit.com, and it works in both Cmd.exe and Powershell.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor
@arielmt more and more i feel like computer literacy dies with us
@mavica_again I really hope we can eventually find a way to make that not the case.
@arielmt you're supposed to edit text files like a real microsoft knob gobbler now... tell copilot to write you a bunch of lines of powershell piping text to Out-File.
@arielmt WSH was so easy to, well, host, in your own application, I miss when software was composable components that didn’t each come with a chain of remote package manager dependencies a mile long
Windows Script Host is still in Windows 11, & it chooses the VBScript interpreter if a text file is saved with a ".vbs" extension instead of a ".txt" one.
But Windows 11 doesn't even have Notepad anymore, let alone Edit, Edlin, or any other text editor.
Oddly enough, KDE's Kate text editor is in the Microsoft Store. I used it to make sure what I just said was true, & writing a simple "helloworld.vbs" file sparked a moment of joy I haven't felt in any current Windows version in 15 years.