zx VS chalk

The top-level await feature for ES modules makes it easy to use await in CLI scripts (e.g., with .mjs sources and zx), and for dynamic imports and data loading. It extends the await functionality into the module loader, which means that dependent modules will wait for async modules (with top-level await) to be loaded.

Yeah, there's no reason not use Node for scripting work on the server. Google's zx library (https://github.com/google/zx) makes it easy to to do bash-like things using Node.js. You can get pretty fancy with promises and async/await to run things in parallel.

For scripting you should have a look at: https://github.com/google/zx It's nodejs but with some nice syntax sugar for scripting.

Umm, for any complex script configuration you can use https://github.com/google/zx other than that it depends on your environment and how are you supplying the value to the script

This talks a bunch about the "good run" of current scripting languages, including for example JavaScript.

But JavaScript, as an actual scripting language, has been pretty primitive but finally starting to become a real candidate for actual scripting. There's imo crufty not very great options like shelljs[1]. But adding a tagged-template string for system(), for calling things, and a little bit of standard library has made JS a much more interesting & competent scripting language. Those efforts are being done in ZX[2].

I like the idea of the topic, exploring it. But the author feels off in a number of places.

> What TypeScript showed is that you could join together the idea of a flexible lightweight (and optional!) type system onto an existing programming language, and do so successfully. . . .The question then is - what if you created a programming language from the start to have this kind of support?

Personally I just don't think languages matter very much. They're very similar, by & large. They have different tooling, packaging, somewhat different looks/feels for executing code, and their standard libraries are different. But TypeScript is popular & fast at least 90% because it is JS, because it works with JS things. Arguing that we should try to recreate TypeScript apart from JS sounds like a mind blowing waste of time. Also, Deno has good integrated TypeScript support.

On the topic of easy parallelism, JavaScript promises are imo quite easy to stitch together & use & quite available.

One of the main issues I see with easy-parallelism is that it's too easy: there's too many cases for uncontrolled parallelism. Throwing tarn.js or other worker-pools at problems seems all too common. But one is still left stitching together each pool/stage of work. I'd like to see SEDA[3] like architectures emerge, and perhaps get added to something like ZX standard library.

[1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

[2] https://github.com/google/zx

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_architectu...

A fourth twist is to take off the functional hat and instead use an obscure corner of OOP: multiple inheritance. This isn't natively supported in JS, but some libraries use the technique in the wild (e.g. zx monkeypatches Promises with a facade over the ChildProcess interface). This differs from union types because it's two things simultaneously (rather than one OR the other), and it's up to the consumer to then await it or map over the functor if it needs to, or just access properties synchronously.

I haven't tried it myself, but zx looks like a really simple way to get up and running.

https://npm.im/chalk (131M weekly downloads) https://github.com/chalk/chalk (17k stars)

If anyone is looking for a well-maintained coloring package, check out Chalk (I'm one of the maintainers).

I believe chalk is still a valid alternative.

We add colors to the text by using Chalk

chalk to style the output string.

I assume you mean in DevTools, then yes if the browser supports ANSI escape code, which Chrome and Chrome-based browsers do.