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Comment by pubby | Hacker News Reader

This is the type of program that should be written in C, not in Javascript with 9 different dependencies...

This is the sort of program that has been written in C, and is probably already included on most systems.

I read comments before clicking the link and thought you were kidding... At least it doesn't run in the cloud and require files to be uploaded there.

Though, on second thought, this cloud service idea has some nice potential for evil :)

Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

// quoting https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/

True. But no harm in getting it off the ground quickly before optimising. Git was written in Perl originally, and ported bit by bit to C. I think this shows it can be a good way to work -- prototype quickly, then optimise.

This. You can bicker all day long about the "correct" language to write something in but at the end of that long day of going back and forth nothing actually got written. Better to go with what you know and prototype then weigh the benefits of rewriting/refactoring it in another language/toolchain.

Except, of course, when it is already written and people are just ignorant of tools that have been around for many many years.

As pointed out elsewhere, this functionality already exists in Unix userland tools, like `rm -P` or (for GNU) `shred`.

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