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by claytongulick 1023 days ago
I love nodejs, it's my go-to language for server side stuff.

Even with that bias though, I have to admit that it's awful for typical command line script stuff.

Dealing with async and streams and stuff for parsing csv files is miserable (I just wrote some stuff to parse and process hundreds of gigs of files in node, and it wasn't fun).

Python is the right tool for that job IMHO.

Also, weirdly, maybe golang? I just came across this [1] and it has one of my eyebrows cocked.

[1] https://bitfieldconsulting.com/golang/scripting

3 comments

Ruby is the clear answer here. The fact that more people don't use it for this purpose (its intended purpose!) is a travesty.
Any not-designed-specifically-for-shell language will suck for shell, more or less. Ruby, python, node, whatever, they all have the same problem - you write stuff too much and care about stuff you shouldn't care while in shell.
You're probably right. I just wish there was an easier way to handle json on the command line that didn't turn into its own dsl. The golang scripting seems interesting, might be what motivates me to learn the language.