[inferiorhuman]

Perl and Python perhaps, but what systems ship with Ruby by default.

OSX comes with Ruby and has for ages, although I think that's being phased out.

But I cannot see how Node is in any way worse, harder or less common than Perl/Python/Ruby.

Node has been notoriously difficult to get running on FreeBSD, for instance. Patches were submitted and just sat on by the maintainers. Something like Perl/Python/Ruby let you target a POSIX-ish system easily, Javascript does not (case in point: electron).

[IggleSniggle]

Can you expand on how electron relates to the argument that JavaScript does not easily target POSIX? Isn’t the issue the runtime (Node) not some GUI “library” (electron)?