Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

Post by chubot » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 4:23 PM UTC

mercurial wrote: post #57

chubot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even use Make? I just use shell scripts for automation. The only case where you really need the incremental behavior of Make is C/C++ builds (and arguably it's increasingly inappropriate for this domain as well). For all other kinds of automation I just use shell scripts, since Make is mostly a horribly reinvented shell script dialect.

Autocompletion of make targets in the shell.

   run.sh

   build() {
     ...
   }

   test() {
     ...
   }

   deploy() {
     ...
   }

   # This lets you do ./run.sh build foo bar at the command 
   # line.  The autocomplete scans for functions in .sh files
   # and fills them in as the first arg.

   "$@"

Post by chubot » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

jhh wrote: post #65

chubot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even use Make? I just use shell scripts for automation. The only case where you really need the incremental behavior of Make is C/C++ builds (and arguably it's increasingly inappropriate for this domain as well). For all other kinds of automation I just use shell scripts, since Make is mostly a horribly reinvented shell script dialect.

Saying that Make is a horribly implemented Shell dialect clearly seems like a misrepresentation of Make to me. Make is a non-procedural way to describe the dependencies of your build process. You describe what you want as a result rather than the steps that the interpreter should follow. It's possible to like or dislike this approach but it's clearly qualitatively different from Shell scripting.

   - variables (from the environment)
   - command tokenization
   - escaping rules
   - functions
   - if statements
   - include
   - globbing (in the target line)
   - various magic $ variables
   - process substitution
   - eval
   ... etc.

Post by lstamour » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 4:47 PM UTC

michaelmior wrote: post #108

mradmin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Grunt in particular doesn't bring anything to the table that bash scripts don't One thing that comes to mind is cross-platform builds, which in some scenarios is very useful.

Also, how do I call a JS function in a Bash script? There are lots of JS libraries that existed before Grunt that are useful to incorporate into a build system. If I was relying on Bash scripts, I'd have to write all sorts of wrappers in JS anyway.

Post by noir_lord » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 7:08 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #132

noir_lord wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post just punched me in the gut. I've spent the last couple of weeks playing the "front end build tool dance" (primarily a back end dev) to find a system I like and it simply never occurred to me I could write my own as a quick bash script or python if I think it'll grow. That's an embarrassing oversight.

Good :) Shell scripts will be around for a lot longer than any of those tools. Shell is also significantly easier and faster , if you just want to say run jslint, then minify, etc. I program in lots of languages, so shell is the first tool I reach for. Learning the language is enough; I don't have time for all these quirky build and deploy tools.

Post by noname123 » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

lstamour wrote: post #134

peter_l_downs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm frankly overwhelmed of learning and being exposed to new technologies. The physical draining feeling of learning new keywords to fulfill the same urges is as if I have watched 15 years of porn following from the grainy days of Jenna Jameson on VHS to the heady-days of Internet dial-up gonzo porn of the early 2000's that really explored anal (Gauge, Taylor Rain) to the streaming flash videos of Web 2.0 (Sasha Grey…

Yeah, I was not expecting that. Kind of offended. (a) I'm at work and (b) was not aware of the "splintered and social-mediafied porno-world" nor all its categories. But props to a pun-intended use of the word "spent".