3 ms·

My real issue is the constant wheel-making impulse, that leaves us with a shattered landscape of people tripping and falling over busted-ass and abandoned wheel

My real issue is the constant wheel-making impulse, that leaves us with a shattered landscape of people tripping and falling over busted-ass and abandoned wheels. I have a JavaScript front-end project that uses three different package managers, and four different make-analog tools, plus some batch files sprinkled on top to orchestrate the common use cases of this monstrosity. Nothing that we are doing here is that complicated, except for this sea of shitty half-baked ecosystems around these tools, each of which was considered best-of-breed at one point. What we want to do is slurp some text files up, apply some transformations to them, glob them together, run them through the minifier, and dump them into a final output. This is exactly what a decent makefile would fit well for. Instead, I got this, because apparently nobody wants to use anything that isn't the hot new way to do things, and so very few people have even had enough exposure to know that there are tested tools for these kinds of things that existed. The last time I was using make beyond trivial uses was a decade ago in college (incidentally, I actually did build jars with make, easier than fighting Eclipse...). But just knowing that something exists is more than half the battle, although the problem then is that it's frustrating as all hell watching the same ideas cycle round and round and round every couple years.

w4tson 8y ago
I’ve wasted enough time tinkering with gulp, grunt and webpack to sympathize
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > I’ve wasted enough time tinkering with gulp, grunt and webpack to sympathize And yet, those tools fill a need that would be very hard to replicate with the toolchains that came before it. Good luck doing half of what gulp / webpack do from, say, a Makefile.
  - mmt 8y ago
    I'm not familiar with either of those particular two tools, and what you say may well be absolutely true for both of them. It's just that this argument keeps getting used for every single new "reinvented wheel" (to borrow from the GP). Sometimes the argument is as strong as "it couldn't be done any other way" and sometimes it's as weak as "this one is just incrementally better," but it feels a little like crying wolf. Was it really "very hard" to make the old wheel do what you needed, or perhaps somehow extend it or add a library, or was it just far more fun and exciting to build something from scratch? I generally don't mind a proliferation of tools, except when they start to break or conflict with each other, which is, I believe the GP's main concern, and at least tangentially related to the article.
  - peterbraden 8y ago
    The value of gulp / webpack et al are the plugins. I've had success in several JS projects using make in combination with the shell version of a lot of these plugins and npm scripts. There is value in both approaches.

w4tson 8y ago

I’ve wasted enough time tinkering with gulp, grunt and webpack to sympathize

spookthesunset 8y ago
> I’ve wasted enough time tinkering with gulp, grunt and webpack to sympathize And yet, those tools fill a need that would be very hard to replicate with the toolchains that came before it. Good luck doing half of what gulp / webpack do from, say, a Makefile.
- mmt 8y ago
  I'm not familiar with either of those particular two tools, and what you say may well be absolutely true for both of them. It's just that this argument keeps getting used for every single new "reinvented wheel" (to borrow from the GP). Sometimes the argument is as strong as "it couldn't be done any other way" and sometimes it's as weak as "this one is just incrementally better," but it feels a little like crying wolf. Was it really "very hard" to make the old wheel do what you needed, or perhaps somehow extend it or add a library, or was it just far more fun and exciting to build something from scratch? I generally don't mind a proliferation of tools, except when they start to break or conflict with each other, which is, I believe the GP's main concern, and at least tangentially related to the article.
- peterbraden 8y ago
  The value of gulp / webpack et al are the plugins. I've had success in several JS projects using make in combination with the shell version of a lot of these plugins and npm scripts. There is value in both approaches.