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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

I still find that pretty tacky. Is there a reason someone would build something like this in JS instead of a more suitable language? I get that front-end developers probably know JS best from a user perspective it's a bad language choice just from the distribution alone.

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Unfortunately, we live in a free society where I need to base all my actions on keeping myself employable. This means I'll spend 4 hours writing a small tool in JS instead of 1000 hours trying to learn semantic modern c/c++/rust/golang. That's 990 hours I could spend making more tools, learning new technologies that employers would find relevant on my resume, or spending time with friends and family.

No it's not. The problem is you're grossly misinformed about languages in general (a more suitable language? wtf?). There's nothing wrong with NPM and distributing packages used by the majority of the ecosystem. And for all of NPM's problems, it works literally better than every other garbage package manager. But I suspect your criticism is more because you read some comments about NPM, not that you know what you're talking about.

I kinda agree about JS CLI tools. However, I'm guessing the target market is JS-led front-end developers. Installing via npm makes it simpler to drop in to a toolchain that's already oriented around npm.

Not saying that's right or optimal, of course.

Not to mention that JS isn't an inherently bad language in the first place. Which is an absurd presumption. Most languages have some nice, good and really ugly parts in practice. Modern JS is pretty nice to work with, and often I can get far more done with it far faster than with anything else I would choose.

Node + NPM are second to none in terms of productivity IMHO. I've used and worked with other languages and tools and find that JS tooling is just plain less friction most of the time.

If I had to switch contexts to 3-4 other languages day to day again, I'd hate it... I remember it being so bad working with 3-4 languages every day that It'd sometimes take me 2-3 minutes just to be able to actually listen to a question by a peer and be able to answer. It can not be underestimated.

Node tooling is probably not the best at anything... that said, it's good enough for almost everything.

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