I just feel relieved that the majority here also seems to think this doesn’t make sense
ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
41–50 of 143 posts
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#42This 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 de…
> There are far more JavaScript developers in the world than there are even Python developers I don’t think that’s true. Anecdotally when I was interviewing at a recruiting company (and we let candidates pick any language to be assessed in), Python was by far the most popular choice, chosen by about 60% of candidates or something like that. Java and JavaScript came after, followed by a long tail of languages like C#…
Python is just fastest to write. No semicolons, fewer parens, no braces, no const / var / let. List / dict / set comprehensions. Lambdas are clunkier, but `def` is shorter than `function`. Etc.
Perl and Ruby are comparably compact and expressive, but relatively few people know Ruby, end even fewer people know Perl, especially among those younger than 50.
BTW Haskell is also syntactically compact and expressive; I once solved a toy interview problem using it. But even fewer people know it at a practical level, among interviewees and interviewers alike.
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#43This 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 de…
My big use case for this is that it's quite good for glue scripting when you're already in the context of a JS shop. My common use cases are tooling setup, CI scripts, and API response sanity checking.
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#44“Ruby - A tool for writing better scripts”
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#45Useless use of cat in their example script.
This is not a serious piece of software.
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#46The first command of the first example is a cat|grep... How can I assume the author is an experienced script writer?
In any case, ZX replaces some of the shell's usual quirks with its own different quirks: you have to manually expand * with glob() and ~ with os.homedir(), you can't build commands as strings without repeated calls to push(), etc.
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#47When my shell scripts get too large, I usually switch to Perl. Still best in class at handling text processing with a few shell commands here and there.
I do the same, in Python. I do my best to keep it zero-dependency to maximise portability.
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#48"[For writing complex scripts] JavaScript is a perfect choice". Not sold on that. Why should I choose it over Python, PHP or others?
yea same here. I wrote nodejs programs for years. the focus on the eventloop and everything being asynchronous is great for servers and network IO but does NOT make it the perfect choice for scripts. Its a different use case entirely. scripts are supposed to be small simple programs that run in sequence and terminate. I shouldn't need to deal with concurrency primitives at all in that particular situation.
With modern JavaScript (as in last 5-7 years) it's pretty straightforward to write sequential scripts.
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#49Neither is bash great, nor is JavaScript a prefect choice, and the examples are pretty underwhelming with all the inconvenient escapes and keywords
Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
#50Well this doesn't make much sense.
If you rightfully find bash inadequate at some point, just switch to the next most natural tool - Python. Nobody's going to be surprised when they see a Python script.
If you start feeling Python is inadequate too, then:
1) You're wrong, just stick to Python
2) If you're so bent on doing away with familiarity, at least get as much leverage as you can in return and use a "proper" language, like Go / Rust. You get static typing and easy to deploy binaries, which are solid benefits.
Trying to use JS here is the worst of both worlds. Nobody expects to see JS in this context and it doesn't bring much to the table.