What does that buy us?

Ever had to run grep / git / ssh / rsync commands programatically from a Node script? Which library would you pick? Are the available libraries' APIs any good? Which ones are feature-complete? Which ones are still maintained? How tedious is it to figure all that out?

Ever had to convert a document to PDF using LibreOffice's headless mode from Node? Have you ever used Node's child process API directly? Was it intuitive, fun, comfortable?

Ever had to access weird system functionality, such as gconf, from a Node script?

Ever wondered how to tail -f a file using Node?

Ever wondered how to lock your system's screen from a Node script?

Blastoise Shell makes all those things pretty simple.

And in these days of Docker containers, you can even rely on programs existing on the system with the right versions. Maybe we can even put an end to reimplementing git / ssh / rsync / etc in every programming language and just use the canonical implementations instead?