Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 143 posts

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#2

Post by jauntywundrkind »

I really really enjoy using zx.

As a dev it lets me get back to a good scripting language, where I process input, run other programs, emit output. Powerful & succinct.

As a tool maker, it helps me show my work. Many of the common tasks like running an script or calling fetch will by default log what's happening in clear format, pass through the activity. It's fantastic to write these devtools that do a bunch of tasks, but are showing their work at every step. If something goes wrong, the person immediately sees the evidence of what was ran & what the output was. It helps close the iteration loop very effectively.

Zx makes such a huge difference, while being little more than a couple small good ideas to help node.js be more shell-scipty. Good stuff.

I haven't tried Dax, another scripting system atop js, but I see zx glowingly mentioned in it's recent submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315689

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#3

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

This looks really cool, actually, and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before.

My incorrect gut intuition is that JavaScript devs usually don't do very much in depth terminal level command work, but that's of course false on a Bayesian level. There are far more JavaScript developers in the world than there are even Python developers, to say nothing of the long tail of even less popular languages. If 30% of JS devs are heavy terminal users, and 80% of (say) Perl devs, that 30% will still swamp the 80% in terms of absolute numbers.

Hell, that's half the point of Node. Can't believe my gut isn't keeping up with my head here!

Post reply on HN