(Open) standards-compliance becomes essential if we want our work to outlast us. Yes, we all know design by committee is horrible and gets nothing done. The solution is get rid of specs completely though. I don't trust "javascript developers" to have any sort of discipline. I'm sorry if this sounds like stereotyping but it just seems like a trend that we can't ignore.
Do you know how long I spent working on getting the specs right in Cash? Cash isn't perfect, but it took me months of "discipline" before I would let myself do even the initial release, which is `v0.1.0` btw.
I do actually agree with your point about compliance. It would be really cool if we had a POSIX-conformant set of shell commands written purely in JS, as an alternative to having to find and install compiled binary ports that run on our particular non-Unix systems. At least, it's an interesting idea.
Instead whenever something like this comes up, we see a bunch of grumpy systems programmers waving their fists in the air, as if C is the only language powerful enough to manipulate basic strings in the shell. Seems a bit silly to me when you think about it.
However, why do we need to write shell commands in java script? I keep hearing about this new fancy systems language called rust which should be good enough for most projects. Why do we insist on using the same one language everywhere?
https://github.com/aisola/go-coreutils - in Go.
https://github.com/search?l=Nimrod&q=coreutils&type=Reposito... - in Nim (didn't seem to take off)
You know how people write a to-do list, or a forum, or a blog to better learn a language? Some people write coreutils.
Things seem to live on here:
"Why do we insist on using the same one language everywhere?" Who is this "we" you're talking about? Where is this "insistence"? It's not like there is some cabal out there that is organizing a campaign to rewrite everything in JS and also delete everything else. What does it matter to you that people started a new project, that re-implements functionality of a dear, favorite project of yours, without taking resources away from that dear, favorite project? These people, who are only wasting their own time, who would have never worked on your dear, beloved project anyway? If you don't want to use JS, just don't. Stop reading posts about JS.
Because, yeah, that would be an awful thing to happen to shell utils.