7 ms·

I dunno. Maybe it's a reaction to the myriad build tools developed for Javascript recently. Could they have been done with makefiles instead?

capote 10y ago
I suppose so. But there are always many tools for everything. And everyone can select his favorite.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  The problem is if you want support (even commercial help) you'll need to follow some kind of prevailing trend. If I've got a system with grunt or gulp and I need help, I can probably find a local web developer. I'm not so sure if I can find someone who's an expert in Makefiles at the moment.
  - capote 10y ago
    You already found at least one. Also try anyone with a degree in computer science. I'd wager it's in most first year courses; it was in 3 of mine. Also you could consult anyone who spends a lot of time working on/programming for Linux and/or in C/C++. And it's really easy, and there's tons of literature on it on the internet. And it has a manpage.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      I never encountered make in any assignment during my studies. It certainly wasn't mentioned in the lectures. At my university, you didn't learn any tooling at all, if you thought you needed it you had to teach yourself.
      - sotojuan 10y ago
        My professor encouraged us to learn Make but ultimately provided the file for us in every project.
    - jk563 10y ago
      Never heard of it until my 3rd company, much less using it in my first undergrad year.
  - baq 10y ago
    if your devs can't handle learning basic make, all is lost.
    - pawadu 10y ago
      yeah, makes you wonder what kind of bubbles some of these developers are living in if they see Make as some magical relic from the past.
      - detaro 10y ago
        where do you get "some magical relic from the past" from? Not knowing about something != thinking it is useless. The "bubble" is "most people that never used C/C++" (because outside of there, make is pretty rare despite its usefulness), and even if you've used C/C++ you are not necessarily familiar enough with it to know how to properly use it or to realize you can use it as a general tool. Why would you expect people to magically know about (and prefer to others) a tool that's almost never used in the ecosystems they touch, or only behind the scenes?
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      I'd wager there are a fair few Windows devs who don't know make. Granted there are few who truly understand MSBuild to make the comparison fair.
  - TickleSteve 10y ago
    Seriously? The most used build tool in existence... and you don't think you can find someone who knows it? ...That may be the source of your problems if your devs are that inexperienced!
  - mrighele 10y ago
    The main issue is that the prevailing trend in web development changes every six months. I wonder how many developers that know grunt you will find in 3 years.
    - madeofpalk 10y ago
      I see this rhetoric being thrown around all the time, but I don't actually think its true in practice. Grunt came out in 2011 and Gulp came out 2 years later with a superior (IMHO) code-over-convention approach. They've kinda been doing their thing since then. Statements like seem to be nothing but FUD.
      - chongli 10y ago
        It's not about when things come out, it's when people start talking about them. I've been on an for 4 years (a relative newcomer, I know) and this is the first time I've seen either Grunt or Gulp mentioned.
        madeofpalk 10y ago
        So how can you be upset with the zeitgeist changing so frequently if it's taking to 4 years to hear about these widely used (in their field) tools?
- toomanythings2 10y ago
  On Stackoverflow, I scan down the list of questions on the first page and all I see is a myriad of questions about tools I have no idea about and, therefore, cannot help with. Most of these questions have no, or one, answer; most of which aren't helpful. So the problem with choice is the number of people who also know that tool who can help you.
mhd 10y ago
That was Java all over again. - you've got dependencies on some basic Unix commands (cp, rm etc.) in your tasks, so better rewrite that all to use your cross-platform language's facilities. - XML, erm, no, JSON, shall be your only file format.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > dependencies on coreutils Or just install that Ubuntu on Windows thingy and be done with it.
  - na85 10y ago
    Are there even serious developers on the Windows platform? I can't imagine many people lack the `rm` utility. I heard a legend that even the Windows developers run some flavour of unix.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    As soon as that becomes available outside the fast ring I will be spending a lot more time on Windows!
- agentgt 10y ago
  Well in fairness Java does have the excuse that the cloud, and virtual images didn't exist and it was basically a Windows world. Linux/Unix was barely known to most developers. Java also pretty much brought the idea of dependency management (Maven) to mainstream programming languages (although I guess you could argue some of the early Linux did as well (RPM)). It is sort of interesting how Make is sort of like local dependency management.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    > Java also pretty much brought the idea of dependency management (Maven) to mainstream programming languages And Maven is still the only "package manager" I don't end up wanting to beat my head after using. For all the flak that pom.xml gets for being wordy, I know that after installing the JDK and maven all it takes is running `mvn package` and all my build plugins plus dependencies will be downloaded, installed, project compiled, tests run with whatever test runner I decided to use that year, and, assuming they passed, the project packaged up in a .jar or .war ready to be deployed. Some more recent tools like cargo also get this right, but I don't have much of a use case for rust since the majority of my time is spend in web and desktop apps. But EVERYTHING being in one file and one tool makes getting down to business easy, there's no "make sure you run npm install before you call grunt/gulp/brocc/whatever" because maven handles it all. Oh, as an added benefit, I don't scream about dealing with proprietary libraries like I do with .Net. The .Net SDK for our document management system has to be installed on all systems that use it via an MSI, yet the Java one is just a .jar with a couple dependencies, I whipped up a pom.xml for it in 30 seconds, pushed it to an internal maven repo and boom, done. Hell, at that point getting it packaged into an RPM (because I don't do "sprawl shit over the filesystem" deployments) took me another 3 minutes.

capote 10y ago

I suppose so. But there are always many tools for everything. And everyone can select his favorite.

voltagex_ 10y ago
The problem is if you want support (even commercial help) you'll need to follow some kind of prevailing trend. If I've got a system with grunt or gulp and I need help, I can probably find a local web developer. I'm not so sure if I can find someone who's an expert in Makefiles at the moment.
- capote 10y ago
  You already found at least one. Also try anyone with a degree in computer science. I'd wager it's in most first year courses; it was in 3 of mine. Also you could consult anyone who spends a lot of time working on/programming for Linux and/or in C/C++. And it's really easy, and there's tons of literature on it on the internet. And it has a manpage.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    I never encountered make in any assignment during my studies. It certainly wasn't mentioned in the lectures. At my university, you didn't learn any tooling at all, if you thought you needed it you had to teach yourself.
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      My professor encouraged us to learn Make but ultimately provided the file for us in every project.
  - jk563 10y ago
    Never heard of it until my 3rd company, much less using it in my first undergrad year.
- baq 10y ago
  if your devs can't handle learning basic make, all is lost.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    yeah, makes you wonder what kind of bubbles some of these developers are living in if they see Make as some magical relic from the past.
    - detaro 10y ago
      where do you get "some magical relic from the past" from? Not knowing about something != thinking it is useless. The "bubble" is "most people that never used C/C++" (because outside of there, make is pretty rare despite its usefulness), and even if you've used C/C++ you are not necessarily familiar enough with it to know how to properly use it or to realize you can use it as a general tool. Why would you expect people to magically know about (and prefer to others) a tool that's almost never used in the ecosystems they touch, or only behind the scenes?
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    I'd wager there are a fair few Windows devs who don't know make. Granted there are few who truly understand MSBuild to make the comparison fair.
- TickleSteve 10y ago
  Seriously? The most used build tool in existence... and you don't think you can find someone who knows it? ...That may be the source of your problems if your devs are that inexperienced!
- mrighele 10y ago
  The main issue is that the prevailing trend in web development changes every six months. I wonder how many developers that know grunt you will find in 3 years.
  - madeofpalk 10y ago
    I see this rhetoric being thrown around all the time, but I don't actually think its true in practice. Grunt came out in 2011 and Gulp came out 2 years later with a superior (IMHO) code-over-convention approach. They've kinda been doing their thing since then. Statements like seem to be nothing but FUD.
    - chongli 10y ago
      It's not about when things come out, it's when people start talking about them. I've been on an for 4 years (a relative newcomer, I know) and this is the first time I've seen either Grunt or Gulp mentioned.
      - madeofpalk 10y ago
        So how can you be upset with the zeitgeist changing so frequently if it's taking to 4 years to hear about these widely used (in their field) tools?
toomanythings2 10y ago
On Stackoverflow, I scan down the list of questions on the first page and all I see is a myriad of questions about tools I have no idea about and, therefore, cannot help with. Most of these questions have no, or one, answer; most of which aren't helpful. So the problem with choice is the number of people who also know that tool who can help you.

mhd 10y ago

That was Java all over again. - you've got dependencies on some basic Unix commands (cp, rm etc.) in your tasks, so better rewrite that all to use your cross-platform language's facilities. - XML, erm, no, JSON, shall be your only file format.

majewsky 10y ago
> dependencies on coreutils Or just install that Ubuntu on Windows thingy and be done with it.
- na85 10y ago
  Are there even serious developers on the Windows platform? I can't imagine many people lack the `rm` utility. I heard a legend that even the Windows developers run some flavour of unix.
- pawadu 10y ago
  As soon as that becomes available outside the fast ring I will be spending a lot more time on Windows!
agentgt 10y ago
Well in fairness Java does have the excuse that the cloud, and virtual images didn't exist and it was basically a Windows world. Linux/Unix was barely known to most developers. Java also pretty much brought the idea of dependency management (Maven) to mainstream programming languages (although I guess you could argue some of the early Linux did as well (RPM)). It is sort of interesting how Make is sort of like local dependency management.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > Java also pretty much brought the idea of dependency management (Maven) to mainstream programming languages And Maven is still the only "package manager" I don't end up wanting to beat my head after using. For all the flak that pom.xml gets for being wordy, I know that after installing the JDK and maven all it takes is running `mvn package` and all my build plugins plus dependencies will be downloaded, installed, project compiled, tests run with whatever test runner I decided to use that year, and, assuming they passed, the project packaged up in a .jar or .war ready to be deployed. Some more recent tools like cargo also get this right, but I don't have much of a use case for rust since the majority of my time is spend in web and desktop apps. But EVERYTHING being in one file and one tool makes getting down to business easy, there's no "make sure you run npm install before you call grunt/gulp/brocc/whatever" because maven handles it all. Oh, as an added benefit, I don't scream about dealing with proprietary libraries like I do with .Net. The .Net SDK for our document management system has to be installed on all systems that use it via an MSI, yet the Java one is just a .jar with a couple dependencies, I whipped up a pom.xml for it in 30 seconds, pushed it to an internal maven repo and boom, done. Hell, at that point getting it packaged into an RPM (because I don't do "sprawl shit over the filesystem" deployments) took me another 3 minutes.