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The whole front-end build process ecosystem seems hopelessly complicated and frustrating to me, but I'm a hoary, old, nearly thirty, backend developer. I've yet

The whole front-end build process ecosystem seems hopelessly complicated and frustrating to me, but I'm a hoary, old, nearly thirty, backend developer. I've yet to have anyone satisfactorily explain why grunt or gulp or webpack is better than makefiles and shell scripts, other than "But its JavaScript!" Every month or so, dependencies break, and everything changes; it seems like a lot if work for very little result.

natural219 9y ago
Bash and C absolutely suck to work with if you're not a systems developer. There's so many caveats, gotchas, extra ways to do things, hidden things you have to learn, and lack of clear explanations that touching any ordinary shell file makes me want to scream. If someone wrote a "makefiles for web dummies" tutorial that told me exactly how to do things everything in bash I know how to do with javascript, I'd love to read it.
- megaman22 9y ago
  Make is it's own thing, and not really tied to C in any way. I've written more makefiles for Java projects when I despised Eclipse than for any other reason. I'm sure that's completely wrong and fucking awful, but it worked really, really well.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Make was the choosen tool for Java projects before Ant came into the scene.
  - h_r 9y ago
    While I can somewhat sympathize with wanting to use make, it's the dependency management with Java that would be just horrible. Maven-based dependency management saves you a world of misery most of the time. And when you have conflicts to deal with it's 1000 times worse doing it by hand.
always_good 9y ago
Well, portability, for one. Also, Webpack is a sequence of one-liner incantations that do things that would be annoying to by hand, like starting a websocket server to talk to your application to hot-swap the code. The declarative config is an improvement over Gulp and Makefiles for that reason. Same reason I prefer pom.xml over build.gradle.
batmansmk 9y ago
I hear you. Let me share you my findings, knowing that with 10 years only of experience, I found great comfort in this stack. It is not perfect, but it is indeed better than the previous one for me. Portable - run on mac, windows, linux, others. Embedded - ship with the project. JS friendly / Integrated - for instance you can read and write from JSON/JS/APIs easily. Tons of plugins adapted to web and mobile related concerns. Try to minify CSS with make? Adapted to modern hardware constraints - for instance, sharing global deps is not the default best practice anymore since HD space is not at premium anymore. Multicore/multithread is the default option, not behind a flag. I/O is the modern constraint, not RAM. Limited knowledge to get started - imagine it is the first app you are making in JS, you just learned the diff between the browser and the server ;). Gulp takes you from where you are, make requires knowledge of Linux, bash, env variables, probably apt-get/yum, make itself. A place you have never been before. Modern doc - it's my opinion, but man is an awful doc interface. No quickstart, it has a TOC, not a menu and no search bar sig. Innovative 'cause no legacy - we wouldn't have investigated hot reloading, smart watch mode, "better" pkg mgmt. Easier to debug. No context switch ...
intrasight 9y ago
I'm sure there are and will always be many more commercial apps compiled with Make than there are with the sum of all those done in JS spaghetti. So keep your Make skills up to date. I've been using it for almost 30 years! Now I'm really feeling old, seeing that I've used Make for longer than you've been alive - you hoary, old developer ;)

natural219 9y ago

Bash and C absolutely suck to work with if you're not a systems developer. There's so many caveats, gotchas, extra ways to do things, hidden things you have to learn, and lack of clear explanations that touching any ordinary shell file makes me want to scream. If someone wrote a "makefiles for web dummies" tutorial that told me exactly how to do things everything in bash I know how to do with javascript, I'd love to read it.

megaman22 9y ago
Make is it's own thing, and not really tied to C in any way. I've written more makefiles for Java projects when I despised Eclipse than for any other reason. I'm sure that's completely wrong and fucking awful, but it worked really, really well.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Make was the choosen tool for Java projects before Ant came into the scene.
- h_r 9y ago
  While I can somewhat sympathize with wanting to use make, it's the dependency management with Java that would be just horrible. Maven-based dependency management saves you a world of misery most of the time. And when you have conflicts to deal with it's 1000 times worse doing it by hand.

always_good 9y ago

Well, portability, for one. Also, Webpack is a sequence of one-liner incantations that do things that would be annoying to by hand, like starting a websocket server to talk to your application to hot-swap the code. The declarative config is an improvement over Gulp and Makefiles for that reason. Same reason I prefer pom.xml over build.gradle.

batmansmk 9y ago

I hear you. Let me share you my findings, knowing that with 10 years only of experience, I found great comfort in this stack. It is not perfect, but it is indeed better than the previous one for me. Portable - run on mac, windows, linux, others. Embedded - ship with the project. JS friendly / Integrated - for instance you can read and write from JSON/JS/APIs easily. Tons of plugins adapted to web and mobile related concerns. Try to minify CSS with make? Adapted to modern hardware constraints - for instance, sharing global deps is not the default best practice anymore since HD space is not at premium anymore. Multicore/multithread is the default option, not behind a flag. I/O is the modern constraint, not RAM. Limited knowledge to get started - imagine it is the first app you are making in JS, you just learned the diff between the browser and the server ;). Gulp takes you from where you are, make requires knowledge of Linux, bash, env variables, probably apt-get/yum, make itself. A place you have never been before. Modern doc - it's my opinion, but man is an awful doc interface. No quickstart, it has a TOC, not a menu and no search bar sig. Innovative 'cause no legacy - we wouldn't have investigated hot reloading, smart watch mode, "better" pkg mgmt. Easier to debug. No context switch ...

intrasight 9y ago

I'm sure there are and will always be many more commercial apps compiled with Make than there are with the sum of all those done in JS spaghetti. So keep your Make skills up to date. I've been using it for almost 30 years! Now I'm really feeling old, seeing that I've used Make for longer than you've been alive - you hoary, old developer ;)