I know far more about scripting linux/unix than Powershell, so I can't really speak directly to Powershell's strengths and weaknesses. But there's reason to be skeptical that Powershell has actually blown bash out of the water, I think. If it made that much difference, linux/unix would have adopted Powershell's object paradigm for itself.
I'm not sold on Ruby gems. I haven't learned Ruby yet. Shell scripting to me means bash (or /bin/sh) + whatever utilities come standard on a unix system: sed, awk, etc.
The goals may be slightly different, reflecting the different cultures using the shells. What I think is cool about bash scripting is that I use bash constantly, anyway, which makes it easy to test small script fragments before including them in a full-on script, and even though, e.g., some things are nasty to do syntactically in bash, I get lots of practice.
I'm not sold on Ruby gems. I haven't learned Ruby yet. Shell scripting to me means bash (or /bin/sh) + whatever utilities come standard on a unix system: sed, awk, etc.
The goals may be slightly different, reflecting the different cultures using the shells. What I think is cool about bash scripting is that I use bash constantly, anyway, which makes it easy to test small script fragments before including them in a full-on script, and even though, e.g., some things are nasty to do syntactically in bash, I get lots of practice.