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It's shit like this, HN. Why you guys make this nonsense end up on the frontpage is honestly beyond me. So this guy re-implemented the most useful grunt tasks

by Nemcue 13y ago

It's shit like this, HN. Why you guys make this nonsense end up on the frontpage is honestly beyond me. So this guy re-implemented the most useful grunt tasks in his own language. Grats. You've wasted time instead of using Grunt. Saving time and not re-implementing things was the point all along. Very few people want to write "small programs" to chain together build tasks. They should be readily available, just work, be continously updated, and work cross platform. I don't want to go look into the intricacies of compiling Handlebars templates just to do that shit. Also, a make file syntactically looks like garble compared to a well honed Gulp / Broccoli file.

fnl 13y ago
That's because, I may presume, you have never (really) used make. For somebody who does, exactly the opposite will be true.
- shadowmint 13y ago
  No, read his comment carefully. Grunt comes with a set of existing (and maintained by the grunt authors) plugins for many common tasks that lets you get away with having someone else do all the complex shell-script-custom-language-scripting you need to do with make for the 'complex logic bits'. Writing those by hand is a terrible and tedious burden in using make.
andrey-p 13y ago
Making small shell scripts and the appearance of the syntax is a matter of taste, I guess. I personally quite enjoy knowing exactly what a script does but the appeal of make to me is that I can use it in non-JS projects, too. I recently had the need to automate batch of converting XCF files to PNG files. Writing and publishing a Grunt module just for that seems a bit over the top, and it would end up a wrapper for a few lines of bash anyway.
- lowboy 13y ago
  You can use Grunt and gulp for any sort of projects, not just ones involving JS.
  - andrey-p 13y ago
    I've only used Grunt briefly so I could be completely wrong, but I was under the impression you still need to create a node module for your task if it doesn't exist? You need to package it up somehow, link it in the gruntfile and so on. In my use case, I was using a CLI utility called xcf2png. Writing a wrapper module seems like loads more work than a bash one-liner that calls xcf2png, no?
    - WickyNilliams 13y ago
      grunt-shell let's you call out to the shell. Very easy to set up https://github.com/sindresorhus/grunt-shell https://github.com/sindresorhus/grunt-shell
gbog 13y ago
I spent two days trying to get grunt, nodejs, ruby working on my PC some month ago, all with the help of seasoned front-end devs. To no avail. So, well, your argument can be reverted: why try to install a big "let's do it all" machinery which depends on the latest versions of very recent tools, while a simple Makefile, which will run everywhere, would do the task?

by Nemcue 13y ago

fnl 13y ago

That's because, I may presume, you have never (really) used make. For somebody who does, exactly the opposite will be true.

shadowmint 13y ago
No, read his comment carefully. Grunt comes with a set of existing (and maintained by the grunt authors) plugins for many common tasks that lets you get away with having someone else do all the complex shell-script-custom-language-scripting you need to do with make for the 'complex logic bits'. Writing those by hand is a terrible and tedious burden in using make.

andrey-p 13y ago

Making small shell scripts and the appearance of the syntax is a matter of taste, I guess. I personally quite enjoy knowing exactly what a script does but the appeal of make to me is that I can use it in non-JS projects, too. I recently had the need to automate batch of converting XCF files to PNG files. Writing and publishing a Grunt module just for that seems a bit over the top, and it would end up a wrapper for a few lines of bash anyway.

lowboy 13y ago
You can use Grunt and gulp for any sort of projects, not just ones involving JS.
- andrey-p 13y ago
  I've only used Grunt briefly so I could be completely wrong, but I was under the impression you still need to create a node module for your task if it doesn't exist? You need to package it up somehow, link it in the gruntfile and so on. In my use case, I was using a CLI utility called xcf2png. Writing a wrapper module seems like loads more work than a bash one-liner that calls xcf2png, no?
  - WickyNilliams 13y ago
    grunt-shell let's you call out to the shell. Very easy to set up https://github.com/sindresorhus/grunt-shell https://github.com/sindresorhus/grunt-shell

gbog 13y ago

I spent two days trying to get grunt, nodejs, ruby working on my PC some month ago, all with the help of seasoned front-end devs. To no avail. So, well, your argument can be reverted: why try to install a big "let's do it all" machinery which depends on the latest versions of very recent tools, while a simple Makefile, which will run everywhere, would do the task?