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Comment by Smudge | Hacker News Reader

Simpler is better.

Cygwin is overkill unless you are trying to mimic your exact non-Windows environment, and it doesn't mix well with Windows' vanilla CMD environment. For those of us who want to be working with more Windows than UNIX, but who are used to standard coreutil commands, 1/100th the functionality of cygwin actually sounds kind of great!

Not saying that the commands need to be written in JS, but it seems like every language gets at least one coreutils implementation, so why not?

So much negativity around here. Honestly I find it pretty neat that JS has come this far.

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node.js is not simple or even simpler

However, I already have it.

You already have a processor too, and something running directly on that is, in fact, more simple.

It's more simple from the point of view of the processor, I suppose, but that's not a useful metric for me.

Is your unit of simplicity really "I already have this installed"? Because then this hello world line I just wrote is more complex than your OS.

From the point of view of the user, yes.

Maybe simplicity isn't exactly what I'm talking about, but yes. In fact, I couldn't run your hello world without running my OS. So from a practical point of view, me running your hello world has a dependency on my OS. From that perspective, it's easier for me to run my OS than your hello world.

I see. So you have these coreutils installed? Because if not, they're exactly as "simple" as cygwin, which is also not installed.

No, I don't. I have a vague recollection that cygwin was a huge and confusing monolith, but I haven't looked at it in years. This new javascript thing sounded more straight-forward. It's not really objectively supported.

I don't even like javascript.

Cygwin is pretty simple to install and use. Download an .exe installer, click click click, open the Cygwin prompt shortcut.

Yes, but - when you hit some bug or just need some specific combination of commands, there would be thousands posts on the web that explain how to do on unix that will work in Cygwin. Will they work in this environment?

The question is hypothetical. Sometimes the answer would be yes. Sometimes the answer would be no.

I also have Fortran, Cobol, SWI-Prolog, OCaml, Elixir and Erlang on my computer, so I guess we need to re-implement core utils in these languages too. Using the followings in any technical arguments is just plain stupid:

- it works on my laptop

- but I already have it

Using a node script doesn't munge the rest of my shell environment. Cygwin, on the other hand...

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