4 ms·

There are other benefits to make. First, you'll need to ask users to install grunt, whereas make is standard and is just there (except for Windows, probably).

by gkya 13y ago

There are other benefits to make. First, you'll need to ask users to install grunt, whereas make is standard and is just there (except for Windows, probably). Second, make provides a language that is optimised to express the information it needs, whereas grunt uses a JSON file. It gave me headaches when I needed to edit grunt config at my last job, and I never touched grunt ever since. Third, all the tasks you've specified can be done with standard UNIX utilities, whereas you depend on third-party libraries with grunt. Also, I do not think that any of those tasks are complex. I'd rather rewrite a 4-LOC shell script in my new project, instead of depending on a build tool that depends on a non-standard, infant runtime itself, and also depends on third party libraries for deleting files.

auvrw 13y ago
i was going to say something in response to the article about dependencies from a positive standpoint for grunt, but i think it makes sense to put it here. rather than having a unix development environment for the browser platform, thanks to lighttable, grunt, and others, it's possible to use node/web-browsers as a development environment as well. i guess node isn't as venerable as unix or even the jvm for that matter, but is "infant" really a fair characterization? i've heard that node can actually do some types of string processing faster than the jvm. i totally agree on starting with shell scripts, though. i tend to put short scripts all throughout repos, even if they just run a single command with a few arguments. sometimes they grow into longer scripts, and sometimes they get changed to run different programs (e.g. grunt<->make), but having a few consistent names for tasks like build, run, test, and deploy (.sh) across projects and languages goes a long way to cut back on cognitive load.
- gkya 13y ago
  > ... but is "infant" really a fair characterization? The point I wanted to make was that one needs to install node to run grunt; I don't believe there's any OS that distributes node in the base distribution, whereas make and sh is a part of the POSIX standard, and perl/python is available by default on most OS's. Also, node is indeed infant and young, don't consider that a bad characterisation, I do enjoy playing with node. My plea is that one should not need to install some software to run the build scripts in a project they download.
shadowmint 13y ago
grunt uses a JSON file Actually grunt uses a javascript file you can drop node code into (not a stupid DSL, an actual programming language no less). I'd rather rewrite a 4-LOC shell script in my new project... Anyway, if you want to throw away your precious developer hours writing yourself a new makefile build system for every project and throw away the nice principles of code reuse, you can. ...just maybe don't tell who ever is paying you that you're doing it that way. (or wait, you can reuse code with make can't you? It's called autoconf or something like that...)

by gkya 13y ago

auvrw 13y ago

i was going to say something in response to the article about dependencies from a positive standpoint for grunt, but i think it makes sense to put it here. rather than having a unix development environment for the browser platform, thanks to lighttable, grunt, and others, it's possible to use node/web-browsers as a development environment as well. i guess node isn't as venerable as unix or even the jvm for that matter, but is "infant" really a fair characterization? i've heard that node can actually do some types of string processing faster than the jvm. i totally agree on starting with shell scripts, though. i tend to put short scripts all throughout repos, even if they just run a single command with a few arguments. sometimes they grow into longer scripts, and sometimes they get changed to run different programs (e.g. grunt<->make), but having a few consistent names for tasks like build, run, test, and deploy (.sh) across projects and languages goes a long way to cut back on cognitive load.

gkya 13y ago
> ... but is "infant" really a fair characterization? The point I wanted to make was that one needs to install node to run grunt; I don't believe there's any OS that distributes node in the base distribution, whereas make and sh is a part of the POSIX standard, and perl/python is available by default on most OS's. Also, node is indeed infant and young, don't consider that a bad characterisation, I do enjoy playing with node. My plea is that one should not need to install some software to run the build scripts in a project they download.

shadowmint 13y ago

grunt uses a JSON file Actually grunt uses a javascript file you can drop node code into (not a stupid DSL, an actual programming language no less). I'd rather rewrite a 4-LOC shell script in my new project... Anyway, if you want to throw away your precious developer hours writing yourself a new makefile build system for every project and throw away the nice principles of code reuse, you can. ...just maybe don't tell who ever is paying you that you're doing it that way. (or wait, you can reuse code with make can't you? It's called autoconf or something like that...)