[nailer]

Probably because JavaScript is the worlds most popular programming language, it's portable, has the largest package manager, supports the shell's non blocking requirement, and the current version (ES6) has a better stdlib than previous versions.

[tacos]

You're wrong on about three of those statements, but note that the same hand wave could have been made for Perl ten years ago. That would've been a poor choice then for the same reason Javascript is a poor choice now.

[nailer]

> You're wrong on about three of those statements

OK. Do you have any supporting arguments? "You're wrong" doesn't contribute anything.

> note that the same hand wave

It's not a "hand wave". Those things are easily verifiable facts. You're new here, you might want to read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[tacos]

Not new. Javascript is not the most popular language, does not have the largest "package manager" (nor standard library, nor package library which is what I think you mean) and more importantly it does not have the most programmers specializing in the problem domain at hand -- shell functions. Moreover the referenced toolset doesn't even use Javascript! You merely jumped in blind to promote your favorite tool. Also if you want to play HN-by-the-book then you should refute my argument why Javascript shell scripting in 2016 from a cold start is somehow better than Perl shell scripting in 2000 given its lead back then.

[nailer]

> Javascript is not the most popular language

> does not have the largest package library, which is what I think you mean.

Yes, you've said that before. Do you have any supporting arguments?

I'm basing that opinion on:

1. JS is #1 on modulecount and #2 on libraries.io, the two places that track the size of package repositories.

2. JS continually coming up as the #1 or #2 most popular language on StackOverflow eg http://www.r-bloggers.com/the-most-popular-programming-langu...

Happy to talk about Perl once this becomes a dialog rather than you telling me I'm wrong without the courtesy of explaining why.

[tacos]

And the most popular girl in my high school can't ride a motorcyle. I took her to prom but I'm not inviting her on my next cross-country ride. What's your point?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_programming_language...

Regardless you don't pick a toolset based on popularity. You choose it based on capability. 100,000 front-end HTML developers asking the same "how do I regex?" question on StackOverflow 10,000 times doesn't pre-qualify an ecosystem as the perfect tool for shell automation.

And at this point you're just trying to save face after you jumped in to explain why it's such a great idea that this project uses Javascript. It doesn't. I'm moving on and suggest you do the same.

[nailer]

My point is that while you keep saying something is wrong, the evidence shows otherwise.

I'm pretty sure you're already aware of that. Your account is new, perhaps you've been here before but you don't seem very capable of participating in technical discussions. I'm going to end this conversion for obvious reasons.