Show HN: pgcmd – An alternative to psql with JSON output

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).

But in this case you're not messing with some arbitrary CSV, you're generating it yourself right before converting into another horrible format. Slightly better.

    $ psql -P pager -nqtc "select row_to_json(pg_database) from pg_database where datname = 'template0'" | jq
    {
      "datname": "template0",
    ...
      "datacl": [
        "=c/postgres",
        "postgres=CTc/postgres"
      ]
    }

For example:

  $ psql dbname -tAc 'SELECT json_agg(some_table) FROM some_table'

By the way, you should not underestimate the built-in psql power and postgresql's json capability. Postgresql's JSON power rivals that of other JSON based No-SQL databases.

    SELECT json_agg(row_to_json(*))

I find this is rampant in the Node community - For any small feature, rather than making a PR or suggesting changes to the original module (maybe via an option), the goal is to create a new library.

I feel what the Node community doesn't realize is that this creates a dependency hell where I can't run my programs which were running a week back, by pulling in the latest libraries.

Another example I came across recently was redux-thunk[0], which is used practically wherever redux is used. All it does is add a callback!

This is entire code of redux-thunk library!

  function createThunkMiddleware(extraArgument) {
    return ({ dispatch, getState }) => next => action => {
      if (typeof action === 'function') {
        return action(dispatch, getState, extraArgument);
      }
  
      return next(action);
    };
  }
  
  const thunk = createThunkMiddleware();
  thunk.withExtraArgument = createThunkMiddleware;
  
  export default thunk;