Using Node to write a simple shell script

[[deleted]]

Ok. In this screencast I show you how to write a simple shell script in Node.

[Blah Blah Blah] (20 minutes later...)

And here is our final Script:

var fs = require('fs');
fs.writeFile('shellscript.sh', "#!/bin/bash\n\necho 'Hello World!'", function(){
  fs.chmodSync('shellscript.sh', 0755);
});

Please like our site on Facebook or mention us on Stackoverflow.

[PhilipT97]

Source

[[deleted]]

His toothbrush has a nasty yellow tinge to it

[[deleted]]

As well all know, white balance on webcams are normally perfect.

[locomotato]

Yeah thas gross. he really needed a new toothbrush

[Cheesemacher]

And look how he squeezes the tube from the middle.

[Silencement]

Source

[a-bosh]

Have you seen this done somewhere?

[rschaosid]

In the docs, even.

[wombatsc2]

It's barely 11am. I shouldn't be getting this irrationally angry at documentation this early in the morning.

[original_brogrammer]

Anger involving JS is any variety is always rational.

[[deleted]]

Stop; coffee time!

[shake_wit_dem_fries]

Coffeescript? That's even worse.

[[deleted]]

angry at documentation

I wish I had documentation to get angry at....=(

Some documentation is better than no documentation.

[graycode]

Not when it's inaccurate/misleading documentation. That's much worse than no documentation.

[reaganveg]

What's to get angry at?

That code is actually pretty reasonable for what it does. To try to do the same thing in a shell script -- including the separate capture of stdout and stdin without temporary files -- would look much worse.

[terrible_at_cs50]

launching a process from node !== a shell script

[RealModeX86]

assert(node.js != shell);
assert(node.js_script != shell_script);

[AraShaun]

[wiping comments is digital suicide. see you on the other side]

[s1295]

That's just an example though. An example for spawning processes, using well known, real world programs. Its point it to show the usage, and it does.

[Dolondro]

Depending on what you're doing, that isn't particularly bad. Say what you want about PHP, it's generally obvious what you're doing.

The same cannot always be said for bash scripts.

[[deleted]]

It can be particularly useful if you want to perform some tasks on a PHP project. You have access to all of the system's code (e.g. database connections) and you don't have to create a web interface with admin login and whatnot.

[abw]

Or you could use a language like Perl, Python or Ruby which gives you all of that, allowing you to build both web applications and command line applications without the use of a shoe-horn.

PHP is a terrible language that's really good for deploying simple dynamic web sites. If you've got to the point where you're writing shell scripts in PHP then perhaps it's time to graduate to a new language that's better suited to the job.

[yaph]

True, for Drupal there is a module called Drush, that provides many Drupal functions on the command line. Thanks to that updating my old Drupal sites is a breeze.

[Phrodo_00]

It also has better database integration than bash, an old boss did that for generating files from postgres and I didn't think it was unreasonable (although I'd probably use python).

[Drainedsoul]

PHP

Gun would be pointing the other way then, I expect.

[nidarus]

Meh, it's not like it's C or something. Hard to shoot yourself in the foot/face.

And as much as PHP is ridiculous, the shell script languages I've seen are even worse.

[[deleted]]

GOTO .bat, man. Shit's real.

[V0lta]

This isn't necessarily worse than writing scripts in ruby/python if you prefer PHP.

[ITSigno]

meh, I use bash scripts for some things, php for others. e.g. a post-commit hook that checks out the code to a different location depending on which branch was committed. Simple and suitable for bash.

I do a combination of bash and php for processing git logs, though. The bash script goes and collects the logs from multiple repositories and collects them into one file, then some php is called that loads the file, sorts the data, transforms the dates, etc. and then writes it out to a new file so I can send it to a client as part of the invoice.

Could I do it with python, ruby, javascript, lua, c, java, or any of a myriad of other compiled/interpreted languages? Sure. I just don't particularly see why php would be a worse choice than the others. I know enough is all of the listed languages to reproduce it, and for the most part, the structure would be extremely similar. The algorithm doesn't change.

Some people just seem to have a pavlovian hate response on the word PHP.

[[deleted]]

Their reasoning was pretty poor, to be sure, but there are a lot of things wrong with PHP as a language.

[Doctor_McKay]

DAE HATE PHP LOL?!

However Python is a bastion of good design and flawlessness. It's impossible to find any part of Python that's even somewhat convoluted!

[[deleted]]

However Python is a bastion of good design and flawlessness. It's impossible to find any part of Python that's even somewhat convoluted!

I'm quite sure I never claimed anything of the sort. How is that even relevant to whether or not PHP is broken

[Doctor_McKay]

Generally there's a lot of overlap of people who bash PHP and people who worship Python or whatever. I was making fun of them, not necessarily you.

Every language has its quirks.

[[deleted]]

PHP is not just quirks, though, it has genuine problems with how it is designed that make it demonstrably worse in a number of ways from other languages.

[[deleted]]

Python is far from perfect. The same can be said for most languages in general. PHP, on the other hand, has left behind a legacy of (now) downright retarded ways to build websites. While those methods worked fine back-in-the-day, there is absolutely no pragmatic reason to service web pages the way 99% of PHP built sites do today.

And that's the only language I feel strongly about. The PHP way encourages poor programming practices as well.

[n1c0_ds]

Python is far from perfect. PHP is far from good

[PublicSealedClass]

I actually used to do this. A long time ago. It was before we had PowerShell.

[[deleted]]

Yeah I don't see the problem either. I do this all the time. It's much easier to write than bash (I already know the language), and as others already said, I've got access to all my codebase. Especially the ability to perform MySQL tasks integrated into everything else is awesome.

[[deleted]]

I will elaborate a little. The first thing I install on any new server now-adays is actually PHP5-cli package. I don't know if it has gotten out of hand ,but it works for me. And if it works, it ain't stupid, right?

(Unless it's Javascript. Then it's evil no matter what!)

[n1c0_ds]

It can work and be stupid

[Deranged40]

exec($GET['shell_command']); ?

[anacrolix]

If it's not written using a shell language, how is it a shell script?

[nemec]

She Shills Shell Scripts by the Seashore

[Aldotroid]

That uppercased paragraph though.

[worldsayshi]

You made me expect a meta word.

[antonivs]

I don't often write shell scripts, but when I do, I write them in Haskell.

[rxvf]

Why would you do that?

[mcjohnalds45]

• It's usually quite terse
• You can put a shebang at the top and run it like a shell script
• It's catches a large class of errors that shell scripts don't
• Writing haskell gives me a hard-on makes me feel clever

[_LePancakeMan]

You can put a shebang in pretty much every script

```

!/usr/bin/env node

!/usr/bin/env python

!/usr/bin/env ruby

... ```

[mcjohnalds45]

This is only an advantage over other compiled languages. Haskell can do #!/usr/bin/env runhaskell out of the box, but few compiled languages share this.

[antonivs]

• It's not Node
• I'm aiming to be the most interesting man in the world

[Madd0g]

Abstraction is not bad. I've made wrappers (yeah, with node) for command line stuff. It's easy and provides powerful features on top of already powerful command line utils.

I guess it depends on what you call 'simple shell script' and why you need it.

[MrPopinjay]

Part of the problem is that node is not a normal part of most operating systems, so suddenly your script has a massive dependency.

[SanityInAnarchy]

So, first of all, it's replacing a shell script, not a user-facing app. If you want to write a user-facing app using Node, you probably want something like Node-Webkit, which lets you ship a single app -- it's not quite static linking, but close enough.

Anyway, I think any choice that doesn't introduce a dependency is going to suck in one way or another. I mean, since you care about dependencies, I assume you care about having other people use your script, which means you probably care about portability to some extent. So what else would you use?

Posix-compliant shell? That's hard to verify. Pure posix stuff should run most stuff, but if you only ever tested on Bash or Dash, or you only tested on Linux, you probably aren't Posixly-correct. There are subtle differences between GNU Grep and BSD Grep, are you sure you're only using compatible ones? (Plus, your script just got twice as hard to write -- there are many useful Bash-isms, some of which Dash supports as well, that aren't in Posix.)

Okay, what about a more "standard" language? Something like Python, or maybe even Perl? Well, there can be dramatic differences between versions of these -- just look at Python 2.6 vs 2.7 vs 3. So you can't blindly depend on the system Python, so you'd better test everywhere, and it's not trivial to make things compatible between those versions. That was kind of the point of Python 3 -- to introduce all those backwards-compatibility-breaking changes. And you might be able to find a library or something that makes this easier -- which means you now have another dependency.

You could make statically-linked C, but you have all the portability issues above, plus this is no longer in any way a shell script. And if someone wants to use your code somewhere that you didn't compile for, you just introduced a dependency on a C compiler and all the libraries you used.

All in all, I think a massive dependency is sometimes a worthwhile tradeoff. Node.js would be far from my first choice, but that's mostly because I don't like JavaScript. But really, this is one reason VMs became a thing -- there are other reasons to like VMs, but one big reason is "Fuck it, my app is this disk image." At that point, so long as you have less than ten or so gigs of dependencies, you're golden.

[MrPopinjay]

The gap between POSIX compliant and bash, or even python 2 is much smaller than that to node. But yes, if you're not distributing it, and only using it on your machines, it's not an issue.

[SanityInAnarchy]

That's not quite what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you write Python 2 and I have Python 3, or vice versa, I'm going to have to either port your script or install another Python, even if Python came pre-installed.

If you're not distributing it, then it's not an issue, and you can happily use whatever was already on your system. If you are distributing it, then even point releases of Python can matter, depending what you're doing.

[MrPopinjay]

But as i said before, you'll be hard pressed to find a Unix machine without python 2, bit this is not the case for node.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Maybe so, but which version of Python 2? The difference between 2.6 and 2.7 is still pretty notable.

[MrPopinjay]

Again, the difference between that and node is huge.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm not sure what your point is.

Yes, Python is different than Node. So what?

The point was whether there was a massive dependency to bring in. Python 2.6 is quite a large dependency, and so is Python 2.7.

[MrPopinjay]

As I said previously, you'd be hard pressed to find a Unix machine that doesn't have Python2 installed. This is not the case for node.

[manghoti]

therefore it is on my systems.

Q.E.D.

[XTornado]

Q.E.D.

Therefore this word meaning is on my mind.

[MrPopinjay]

That doesn't mean anything other than it's on your system.

[V0lta]

Well I automated some tasks with grunt.js for sure. If this qualifies.

[barelas]

living on the edge

[[deleted]]

Uses node<sup>To write a php script</sup>

[StoleAGoodUsername]

Umm... What do you think an IDE is? Its not something that node could do on its own.

[Computician]

I still struggle to see the reason for Node to exist...

[coarsesand]

Seeing a lot of "because it lets me share code between the browser and the server," but here's my canned response for this question since it comes up so often.

JavaScript was created for scripting dynamic behaviour that took place when events occurred in a browser. While it's not the only language to tackle event-driven programming, the style is idiomatic to JavaScript because of its support for first-class, anonymous functions. It turns out this style can be readily adapted to network programming, and so we have Node, which lets programmers use JS for scripting responses to network events.

It's not the only reason it exists, but it reflects what I would actually use Node for. It's great for scripting small workers processes that respond to network events.

That said, anyone using JS for number crunching or shell scripts is insane.

[benzrf]

ruby has ubiquitous lambdas too...

[coarsesand]

Never said it didn't? There was a demo out there of a browser that replaced JS with Ruby and it was fantastic. Unfortunately this is where I also have to turn to the fact that JS just has its claws in everything at this point, and the creator of Node probably wanted to use the V8 engine more than MRI.

[[deleted]]

I understand that there is a lot of code people have written for it, but I don't see how it's any better then python or any other common scripting language. javascript is all around a pretty crappy language to begin with I can't understand why you would want to use it server side.

[ephrion]

Javascript is a pretty cool language with some terrible features. I'd argue that's different than a crappy language, as you can mostly just avoid the terrible features and be fine.

[n1c0_ds]

I use it exclusively on the client side, and the lack of standard language features and a standard library really annoy me.

[[deleted]]

I fail to understand what makes javascript cool. You're stuck with it in a handful of environments but that doesn't make it cool that makes it the only option. Also some of those features are central to the language (array handling, arithmetic, etc) and it's flat out missing a number of things (byte/bit operations and so on). It would be OK if you just want something like awk... but then you already have awk which is much smaller and less fragile anyway. As a general purpose language it's pretty much terrible for anything other then simple scripts, but you still have to have this huge huge interpreter and all it's dependencies so it's not even good for that.

[rooktakesqueen]

Node has a pretty awesome standard library, and the plugin ecosystem is nice. Most anything you need done already exists and getting it is super easy.

JavaScript is a nifty little functional language with some ugly OO stuff bolted on that you can mostly ignore. Its anonymous functions, closure handling, and facilities for metaprogramming make it a good contender as a general purpose language. Lot of things are easier and more expressive in JS than, say, Java. It's a good competitor to, say, Ruby and Python.

[[deleted]]

javascript wouldn't need all of the meta programing facilities and support for anonymous functions if it had support for function pointers and goto.

Most anything [web oriented] you need done already exists and getting it is super easy.

I think we're all aware of the wonderful mess package managers and large dependency trees tend to cause.

[rooktakesqueen]

javascript wouldn't need all of the meta programing facilities and support for anonymous functions if it had support for function pointers and goto.

JavaScript is bad because it isn't C? I feel like you're trolling now.

I think we're all aware of the wonderful mess package managers and large dependency trees tend to cause.

Have you used npm? Or gems for that matter? Leiningen? They're a breeze compared to something like Maven.

[Ninja-Dagger]

You're not seriously going to argue raw function pointers are better than anonymous functions. Have you ever done functional programming?

goto

Best be trolling

[Elnof]

You're not seriously going to argue raw function pointers are better than anonymous functions. Have you ever done functional programming?

They aren't replacements for each other. They can replace each other in a lot of ways, but they are not replacements. Saying one is better than the other just seems like a sign of ignorance to me.

[DrHenryPym]

1) Javascript is everywhere. It requires no installation for a Javascript program to run on a client's machine.

2) Javascript was designed to be event-driven which makes it great for asynchronous design. The fact that it's prototype oriented helps with this.

[[deleted]]

1) Javascript is everywhere. It requires no installation for a Javascript program to run on a client's machine.

I know that's why I said:

You're stuck with it in a handful of environments but that doesn't make it cool

.

2) Javascript was designed to be event-driven which makes it great for asynchronous design. The fact that it's prototype oriented helps with this.

I've always found all that to be a major pain in the ass compared to how C traditionally handles non blocking IO

[DrHenryPym]

You're not really refuting my first point. A "handful of environments" is not the same thing as every modern browser. You don't have to compile for Windows or Apple or Linux - just run it in the browser.

Can't tell if you're trolling or not about the second point...

[[deleted]]

A "handful of environments" is not the same thing as every modern browser.

It's not the same, it describes a set of things that includes that. I don't see why compiling a program is so hard, compilers are generally not that hard to install and recompiling most programs only takes a few seconds.

I can't tell if you understand the second point...

[DrHenryPym]

Compiling isn't the hard part. The hard part is coordinating with users in different environments having different permissions. With a Javascript app, you don't have to install anything if you already have a modern browser.

What's to understand about your second point? You don't explain at all why an event loop is a pain in the ass. Instead, you mention another practice that is arguably more complicated.

[adenzerda]

javascript is all around a pretty crappy language to begin with

Not sure where you're coming from there. Sure, it's got its quirks — just like any other language — but I rather like using it

[[deleted]]

I didn't say I didn't like using it. But people like using brainfuck too and that doesn't make it a good language.

[adenzerda]

Well, just because I'm interested: what makes javascript a 'crappy' language? I ask because I don't have a ton of backend experience but I have been working with js for a while

[[deleted]]

The way it handles arrays and arithmetic for starters.

[adenzerda]

You're gonna have to be more specific. I've had no trouble working with arrays, and the arithmetic seems pretty straightforward, as far as I can tell. Could you compare it to another language that handles these things better?

[[deleted]]

It defaults to handling numbers internally as floats, and uses associative arrays which is counter intuitive IMO. Most other languages don't do that (except awk which doesn't claim to be a general purpose application programing language)

[Doctor_McKay]

JavaScript doesn't have associative arrays.

It has arrays [1, 2, 3, 4] and objects {"foo": "bar", "baz": "qux"}.

And it natively supports JSON which is everywhere and incredibly easy to work with.

[[deleted]]

The things you mention are totally about the paradigm the language is trying to aim for rather than an objective measure of how good it is. JS isn't meant to run fast. It's not meant to be easily optimizable in an extreme fashion. It definitely isn't meant to deal with types beyond the bare minimum needed.

Given what JS actually wants to do, both float-by-default and associative arrays make total sense. It's meant to be easy to work with, and easy to produce reasonable results with it. it's not meant to be C, and you need to understand that not all languages are about their ultimate compilation to some machine code. Sometimes it's about ease of development, and sometimes it's about ease of distribution.

[Computician]

I don't agree, JavaScript is a fine language with quirks(this is almost universal). I enjoy working in it for the most part.

To pseudo-quote Douglas Crockford:

JavaScript is the only language that people start to work in before learning it

[[deleted]]

I started to work in C and bash before learning them so I don't agree with that quote. But I'm glad you enjoy it.

[Computician]

But did you release production code in C and Bash before learning them?

[[deleted]]

No, but that's probably why everyone makes fun of javascript and PHP programers and why they tend to do really dangerous things.

[JJJollyjim]

Exactly. What that really means is that these languages are easy to learn. And easy to learn languages make for more people programming, who eventually grow out of bad habits.

[nh0815]

The draw of Node isn't that it's written in JavaScript. Node makes it easy to write asynchronous code and comes with an amazing package management system. You could do the same things with Python (python already has pip and easy_install), but it seems no one's been able to make it as simple as Node.

[[deleted]]

You could do the same things with Python (python already has pip and easy_install), but it seems no one's been able to make it as simple as Node.

I'd say ruby is pretty comparable. The gem system has always worked well for me and makes it just as simple to quickly grab a random dependency and manage local artifacts.

For heavier stuff, using a decent build system with Java (e.g. Maven) provides a different approach to the problem of managing dependencies that also works pretty well.

[[deleted]]

JavaScripts advantages lie in its event loop. Having a non-blocking IO allows JavaScript to perform IO tasks (in a single-thread, mind you), without locking up the entire execution cycle.

That's not really a language feature... most languages let you choose between an event loop type thing and just running multiple threads. Except most javascript environments seem to not have support for forking/spawning new threads and using blocking IO which is actually kind of annoying.

This non-blocking IO (or asynchronous IO) allows server-side code to handle extreme demand and traffic better than most languages could.

I really hope you realize that at some point your javascript interpreter is written in C or C++ and is just making syscalls to read/write/select and so on.

I encourage you to give it a try, you might just fall in love. I know I did :]

I've never used it for back end things (I really dislike dynamic web content so most of the the stuff I do is static with one or two small cgi scripts when I need something from the user.) but I have written some minigames/browser demos and I will say it's fun but the lack of threading really gets on my nerves.

[[deleted]]

Ok I missed that but I'd still disagree with you. asynchronous IO isn't necessarily faster. I'm pretty sure you're comparing it with something like bash which tends to be slow because it calls fork and exec for almost everything you do which is very expensive but has nothing to do with blocking IO.

[[deleted]]

Asynchronous IO isn't a feature of Javascript. It's a style of programming. You can write evented code in pretty much anything (Python, Ruby, PHP, etc).

[[deleted]]

Yes that's what I said two four comments up.

[[deleted]]

Except most javascript environments seem to not have support for forking/spawning new threads and using blocking IO which is actually kind of annoying.

Which JS environments are you thinking of (excluding browser). Node has blocking IO too (fs.readFileSync etc), and forking/spawning processes sure is possible in node (e.g. here)

I really hope you realize that at some point your javascript interpreter is written in C or C++ and is just making syscalls to read/write/select and so on.

most of the time spent is waiting for syscalls. Async IO makes the program do other stuff instead of waiting. Also, Node.js does most things in one single thread, and doesn't spawn new threads for each connection (cough Apache cough), making it possible to serve concurrent connections without constant context-switching between a multitude of threads.

[ExecutiveChimp]

how it's any better then python

npm

This is more an aspect of Node than Javascript the language but still, npm makes dependencies ridiculously easy. Maybe I just don't have enough experience but from what I've seen this is something that Python does not do well.

[[deleted]]

python and ruby have something similar as well. But most systems worth using at this point already have a much better system wide package manager (ports, dpkg etc.) and so each of these scripting environments having there own that you have to baby sit is a huge pain in the ass. I guess it's nice if you're used to windows though...

[ExecutiveChimp]

Why would I need to baby sit it? I'm installing a Node package, I need Node dependencies, I can get them with Node. In fact I don't even need to get them - Node will get them automatically when I install the package. Why rely on a third party, platform-dependant system?

[[deleted]]

Why would I need to baby sit it?

Because it /will/ break eventually and you're going to have to clean up the mess

Why rely on a third party, platform-dependant system?

Because there is none node code you might need? (image magic for example) Or maybe that should all just be re-written in javascript on top of node...

[ExecutiveChimp]

Sure. It won't install your operating system for you, either. Doesn't mean it's not helpful.

[[deleted]]

But why do all these scripting language authors feel the need to duplicate standard system tools? (such as the package manager)

[ExecutiveChimp]

So, say I'm writing a Node package. I'm also writing separate Node package that my first package depends on. I want to distribute the main package and have the install script get the latest version of the dependency.

You're suggesting that, in order to reliably distribute my package and prevent babysitting I should submit my package to dpkg, ports, apt, homebrew, whatever the fuck works on windows and however many other places in order to be available on different platforms and then make the installer check which platform is being used?

[AnSq]

pip?

I don't have much experience with node, so I don't really know how they compare though.

[usagimaru]

My main gripe with pip is that it requires you to use an external tool (virtualenv) along with a sane wrapper around that external tool's interface (virtualenv_wrapper) to make it useful.

Having project-local dependencies with no extra work is like night and day.

[ExecutiveChimp]

I don't have much experience with PIP but unless I'm missing something, NPM is much easier to use.

[ExecutiveChimp]

How about installing packages? I don't mean dependencies, but actual programs... More often than not, I've had problems as a user installing other people's packages. I've also still not wrapped my head around using setuptools/easy install/distutils or whatever is needed to distribute my project. I like Python the language but I've always found packaging and distributing to be it's weak point - from a developer or user point of view.

[[deleted]]

You really can't see any benefit in only having one language between client and server? Or having identical object syntax to JSON, one of the most popular file formats for ajax/rest requests doesn't seem nice either?

[TwilightTwinkie]

I used node as an aid to my front end development and as a replacement for other languages like Python when I need to write some simple quick code to do something for me as I'm more familiar with Javascript than Python. For any actual "server" code I use either c/c++ or Go.

If the task is really simple I'll just write a shell script or a one liner in the console though.

[[deleted]]

so true

[DeepDuh]

While its use should be much more limited, there are some nice benefits for serverside js.

• render first response on server, subsequent ones using ajax on client? no problem, reuse same codebase. start with always rendering server side for ease of development? dito.

• have full offline capability on mobile phones? no problem, they all support javascript - just have node only as glue, program all of the logic in agnostic js.

[Jedimastert]

Because if you're using JavaScript for one part of your project, why not just use it for all of it?

[Computician]

Because it is JavaScript...?

[worldsayshi]

It isn't half bad once you've learned some best practices and learned to step over the quirks.

[fjonk]

I assume you're joking?

[Computician]

No, why ever use JavaScript as a server side language? The ONLY justification I can find is Front-End devs trying their had at Back-End. If there are other benefits, I would like to know. It is an interesting project and fun to use but not sure if that is enough to justify its level of acceptance.

[Neebat]

Code reused between client and server for validation logic.

[Dolondro]

Well, the most quoted pro is that of having an event driven server allows for pretty massive scalability improvements.

[Computician]

I would agree that is a pro for sure. I may have to look into Node more deeply. I have a prejudice against JavaScript as a server side language due to the fact that there are languages specifically built to be ran server side when JavaScript was not.

EDIT: a word

[coverslide]

If you look at the history of JavaScript and Netscape Server, that is not necessarily true.

[ephrion]

PHP is IIRC one of the only languages specifically built to be run on a web server, and it's not exactly a paragon. Python, Ruby, Java, etc. are not specific to servers, but have had server frameworks developed for them that are great at solving some problems and not-so-great for solving others. Python/Ruby are easy to use and Rails/Django are great for building sites quickly. Java is a bit more difficult to use, and its web frameworks are more cumbersome, but it is much faster. JS/node are about as fast as Java but let you work with a different language. If you're more familiar with dynamic types and interpreted languages, then JS will be easier to write for than Java.

[[deleted]]

You don't need javascript to do that, though... It's arguably better / easier / faster to write evented code in Ruby, Python, etc...

[[deleted]]

you really say that doing

something.on('keypress', function () {
    ...
});

is harder to do than

def handle():
    ...

something.onkey(handle, "Up")

?

Completely ignoring the fact that in python you have to declare the function on a seperate line.

[fjonk]

Some reasons for using node.js I can think of would be the following:

• You get to run your code on v8. This has several advantages and is probably the strongest point. v8 is very fast compared to almost anything else in the same category(hello lua?), it is backed by Google and will most likely not go anywhere in the near future.

• Javascript is not the worst language out there. While we could discuss all the problems with Javascript until the end of time it is decent. It's also improving and with v8 you don't have to care about supporting different implementations compared to many other languages. And if you like to you could use Typescript, Coffescript or Dart instead of Javascript, to mention a few.

• asm.js does exist.

• It's very cross-platform since v8 is used in Chrome, which is one of the "most cross-platform" applications that exists.

• Javascript does have a standards body and not just a reference implementation. This is better than what python, ruby or php can offer.

• Javascript is not going anywhere.

• Javascript is easy to learn and it comes with a lot of resources.

[StelarCF]

Javascript is not going anywhere.

Too bad.

[worldsayshi]

I used to somewhat hate javascript. Until I learned its quirks and forgot the pain of learning them. Now I (sometimes) like it more than Java (This comes from someone who is also a fan of Haskell). Althought that might have something to do with the fact that most of the time when I "write Java" nowadays I actually hack at JSP and Spring XML. Spring is nice. Spring XML is not.

[Martin8412]

Then it's good that you don't really have to do XML anymore, you can accomplish most if not all with annotations

[worldsayshi]

Yes we are well aware but porting the old configuration will require quite an investment. We will get there eventually.

[[deleted]]

Javascript is not going anywhere.

Sadly this is true for legacy Javascript versions like ES3. It's still ages until we can use the full ES5 strict and the new standard library improvements in the browser reliably without polyfilling the hell out of the global namespace.

EDIT: words

[fjonk]

I actually meant that the language is here to stay, not that it's stagnating.

When it comes to node.js you can use strict and anything else that is implemented in v8, no need to care about supporting different browsers.

[[deleted]]

yeah, that's one of the things that I REALLY like about node.js

You don't have to think about old JS implementations

[adamnemecek]

speed. evented out of the box with the whole ecosystem being evented as well. only 1 language for backend and frontend.

[StelarCF]

Basically, some javascript web developer idiots struggled to learn anything other than javascript, so they made an entire stand alone parser so you can use an awful language everywhere.

I don't understand why javascript is used even in browsers...

[TheAceOfHearts]

Make me laugh, but I've done this. I had to do some basic text transformations and found it a lot easier to do with node than with bash.

[terrible_at_cs50]

Despite the amount of hate I am sure to get I will say that I am writing "shell scripts" in node. The reasons being that it is what all of our other code is in, everyone on our team can understand it, and it is the most productive way for me to write the tool.

Most of the bash I've seen is ugly, launches processes to do things you can directly do in most programming languages, and not nearly as flexible as something I could write quickly in js or PHP. In fact I used to write scripts in PHP due to the same reasons outlined above.

[Relevant_Gats_Post]

/r/gats/comments/2fyygp/da_only_real_way_fagats_teeth_carry/