[viraptor]

I really have a "scientists asked if they could not if they should" feeling about this one. I've seen and tried lots of solutions like that in different languages, but believe now it's a wrong level of abstraction. If you want to provide some crossplatform way to execute ls, providing an "ls()" function is much cleaner. Otherwise you start accumulating issues like: which flags are supported, does it support streaming, what about newlines in file names, how do you deal with non-utf filenames, what happens with colour output, is tty attached, etc. These are new problems which you didn't have when using the native JS filesystem functions. And when they bite you, it's not trivial to see where / why.

None of the examples really look that hard to replace either. The current solutions are not great. But shell-in-js is putting a familiar lipstick on a pig without addressing the real issues.

Also, the clock is ticking for the first "string got interpolated instead of templated" security issue. It's inevitable.

[skybrian]

There have been many bad templating languages, but I think JSX is ok. There were many bad markup languages before Markdown, and many bad config file formats before JSON.

None of those are perfect, but they're good enough for many purposes.

Similarly, maybe it's not this one, but I suspect that someone will eventually get this right. I do think it does need to be properly standardized, as CommonMark did for Markdown.

[tipiirai]

JSON is a terrible configuration file format. Property names must be quoted, tons of brackets and commas, a mistake comma breaks it, no comments allowed, etc..

[skybrian]

That makes it mediocre, not terrible. There are workarounds. For terrible, see sendmail.

[andyfleming]

JSON5 is a more reasonable format for config files, in my opinion.

[tipiirai]

I prefer YAML on my Markdown front matter. It's more readable because of no brackets, quotes, or commas.

[jerbear4328]

Seconding the sibling, YAML may look nice but it's absolutely full of awful confusing behavior. If you don't like JSON for human-written stuff, see TOML or the like. I think JSON is great for serialization, it's so simple, but I agree we need something more readable like TOML for human-written data.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...

[tipiirai]

Do you convert your Markdown front matter to TOML? Also for your clients?

[andyfleming]

> I prefer YAML on my Markdown front matter. It's more readable because of no brackets, quotes, or commas.

YAML is full of pitfalls. I think the brackets/braces and quotes are worth giving up a small amount readability to eliminate the ambiguity.

[zer00eyz]

>>> There have been many bad templating languages, but I think JSX is ok.

A bad templating language would be worlds better than JSX.... "JSX may remind you of a template language, but it comes with the full power of JavaScript".

JSX is javascript.

This is the very sin that PHP spent its early years getting thrown under the bus for.

IF you build a rich react app, and then figure out later that you need a bunch of static, partial static late hydration pages your going to be running node/bun in production to generate those because its not like you can hand JSX to another, performant, language.

And yes im aware of things like packed. The problem is JSX templates, to a large degree, are not compatible.

Code in templates was bad when PHP did it, when Perl did it, it's bad now.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I wouldn't ls in a random js script either. Use readdir exactly like shown in the article. But to hack something quickly in package.json? Yes, absolutely. I'm not turning all my 1 liners into standalone scripts to potentially maybe avoid using an arg that never got implemented. And now it's cross platform too so I only have to test it on 1 system.

[viraptor]

> And now it's cross platform too so I only have to test it on 1 system.

Not so fast. Did you uppercase the first letter of the file and tested on macos and windows? It will fail on linux. Did you create a file called con.js and test it on non-windows machine? It will fail on windows. Did you rely on sub-second precision timestamps? It will fail on some windows machines.

This is a leaky abstraction. People will run into problems.