4 ms·
No one says "Let's write ECMAScript for portability". If someone did, I would probably be writing about that too.
by gaigalas 4mo ago
No one says "Let's write ECMAScript for portability". If someone did, I would probably be writing about that too.
- hnfong 4mo agoHey guys... I have a wonderful idea. ... Let's write ECMAScript for portability.
- gaigalas 4mo agoCan you imagine? Using that fancy new gen JavaScript today? Oh wait, that's exactly babel's headline! It's just so old now that people don't need to say what it does. Actually funny that the spec drift got solved by polyfills and transpilers.
- paulddraper 4mo agoAre you serious? People say that all the time. People use JavaScript everywhere.
- gaigalas 4mo agoNope, implementors are worried about shaping the spec (which iterates much faster than POSIX) and the overall community around JS has plenty of portability solutions. That simply doesn't happen with portable shell script. There's a lot of misconceptions (people can't distinguish between shell/terminal, shell/coreutils, etc), implementors don't talk to each other. "People use JavaScript everywhere" means nothing for this discussion, it's about whether the ecosystem grasps fundamental portability questions. The JS ecosystem does (now, after some decades), the shell one does not. We have babel, core-js and many other libs. It's just a bunch of trick compilations (Ubuntu's dash vs bash page, Rich's shell tricks), nothing actually sturdy. You can try to bend the discussion to make them closer, but it doesn't survive a critical analysis.