But also hated by some nerds. I don't like to bring up my critiques of unix, because people seem conditioned to love it and couldn't do much about it anyway. People ignore (or get defensive about) things they feel they can't change.
But there's lots of Unix-Haters out there. Kinda like Fight Club, except slightly more gender-inclusive. "Remember this. The people you're trying to dismiss, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who write your embedded devices which cook your food. We make your toy Scheme implementations. We're monitoring your systems while you're asleep. Our systems route the ambulances. Our Erlang processes direct your call. We are Googlers and Facebook coders and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. So don't condescendingly quote man pages at us." (http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/unix-haters.html)
The reason these people were sneering was because the code was written in Javascript, running on Node.js, and Node.js is perceived to be a threat to their own community, Ruby on Rails. They mock and belittle what they fear so they can feel better.
Thought provoking or not, but I think rewriting the nix-utils with your language-of-choise is one of the best opportunity to learn :) Learn more about your language and learn how damn much effort has gone into the nix-utils to get them where they are today.
I think the 'eyes bleeding'-type comments come from the author's rewriting sed in javascript. It seems almost like an exercise designed to provoke: rewriting one of the cornerstone nix utils (loved by many nerds everywhere) into a node.js package (despised by many nerds everywhere).
Like any good conversation starter, replace.js comes with a bit of incorrect information:
It's similar to sed but there are a few differences:
1. Modifies files when matches are found
Easy enough to do with sed: -i
2. Recursive search on directories with -r
find . -exec sed [...] does the same.
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In my estimation, that's the reason for the vitriol. I am intentionally leaving out any analysis on the morality of the reactions to it, but the above should explain why some reactions were less than great. It wasn't about the code itself.