Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by joshuacc » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 9:02 PM UTC

Sheepshow wrote: post #136

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

Repost, don't know the original author: I agree, I can't keep up, I just finished learning backbone.js and now I've found out on HN that it's old news, and I should use ember.js, cross that, it has opinions, I should use Meteor, no, AngularJS, no, Tower.js (on node.js), and for html templates I need handlebars, no mustache, wait, DoT.js is better, hang on, why do I need an HTML parser inside the browser? isn't that w…

The problem here seems to be that you're using HN, a site about what is new as a way of finding out what you should be working with. That's like asking an ADHD kid what game you should be playing. You'll get a different answer every 5 minutes. :-)

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

#142

Post by gcb0 » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 9:06 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #85

gcb0 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

be realistic, this is akin to your team changing a few lines in a makefile, sigh, javascript people,

You're like Lance Armstrong after he retired from road cycling and decided to get into mountain biking because it'd be so easy to stomp the competition in a race with merely 20 miles of distance and 5000' of climbing. Needless to say he got his ass handed to him because there was a whole world of technical skills which he did not even know existed. Riding up a rutted, rocky, rooty slope does not allow you to stand up…

lol. i only do recreational drugs.

and i'm actually a javascript people myself. And i just moved away from grunt in my makefiles (not to that though) a couple weeks ago. my comment still stands.

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

#143

Post by joshuacc » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 9:08 PM UTC

peterhunt wrote: post #75

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

There's a few things going on here that combine to cause this mess. First, task runners, like templating systems and module bundlers, are easy to write so there are lots of them. Grunt in particular doesn't bring anything to the table that bash scripts don't. Second, most open-source projects don't make their value prop clear (I learned this the hard way first-hand and I'm still dealing with it) and most people don't…

> Grunt in particular doesn't bring anything to the table that bash scripts don't.

Other than a simple declarative API for all of your build tasks and a huge ecosystem of tasks.

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

#144

Post by joshuacc » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

leobelle wrote: post #122

lowboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build utilities like Grunt or Gulp will be hopefully more compatible across systems than shell scripts will be. I'm not too familiar with Node's support on various platforms, but I'd wager that it's probably decent. Gruntfiles and Gulpfiles are in javascript too, which lowers the barrier for entry for developers who aren't as versed in linux. Is there a shell script equivalent to npm? Sidenote, that could be really u…

> Grunt or Gulp will be hopefully more compatible across systems than shell scripts will be. On your own stack and dev environment, why would you care about compatibility of shell scripts? Do you change your stack much?

For open-source JavaScript projects, using Grunt or another Node-based tool makes it easier for Windows users to contribute. Node has excellent Windows support, while shell scripts are mostly the domain of *nix.

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

#145

Post by jared314 » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 9:36 PM UTC

Sheepshow wrote: post #136

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

Repost, don't know the original author: I agree, I can't keep up, I just finished learning backbone.js and now I've found out on HN that it's old news, and I should use ember.js, cross that, it has opinions, I should use Meteor, no, AngularJS, no, Tower.js (on node.js), and for html templates I need handlebars, no mustache, wait, DoT.js is better, hang on, why do I need an HTML parser inside the browser? isn't that w…

Source:

http://www.zemanta.com/blog/i-bet-you-over-engineered-your-s... (2 years ago, in the comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206578 (1 year ago)

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

#146

Post by acjohnson55 » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 9:37 PM UTC

peterhunt wrote: post #75

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

There's a few things going on here that combine to cause this mess. First, task runners, like templating systems and module bundlers, are easy to write so there are lots of them. Grunt in particular doesn't bring anything to the table that bash scripts don't. Second, most open-source projects don't make their value prop clear (I learned this the hard way first-hand and I'm still dealing with it) and most people don't…

Interesting point regarding npm and NIH syndrome. I think part of the problem is lack of discoverability, which has led to balkanization of the ecosystem. The next big wave is probably in someone's undiscovered Github repo, be written by someone who simply never found the current best-in-class tools.

I think JS is an interesting case study as well because it's historically with such an impoverished standard library/distribution.

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

#147

Post by ballard » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

This story comes off as the emperors' new clothes.

As long as minified compressed HTML, CSS and JS are served up with the least amortized dev and support time, it's all good.

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

#148

Post by harlanji » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 10:58 PM UTC

ahallock wrote: post #23

The main issue I have with Grunt and other frameworks/build tools is plugin authoring. Can't we just put this stuff in Make files and be done with it? I know, I know, Windows. But it seems like an awful lot of time is wasted building plugins that are just dumb wrappers for CLI options. Or worse, the tool's options get buried deep within the framework, ramping up the learning curve. As a recent example, I stopped usin…

I agree exactly, and have ignored Grunt and now Gulp in favor of Make. Gulp looks to be basically reinventing Std I/O, when we should just be shipping these NPM-based tools with a bin that works via Make or spawn/exec in any other build tool. It makes all the more sense now too, with the early trend toward virtualizing devel environments in Linux VMs.

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

#149

Post by acjohnson55 » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 11:37 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #121

Is the world ready yet to get a cross-platform build tool? One that can compile Java, lint Ruby and concatenate JavaScript? Seems like there's a core set of tasks that are pretty common across platforms.

If only someone would Make something like that. Boy, that would really Make my day...

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

#150

Post by username223 » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 12:59 AM UTC

ElongatedTowel wrote: post #118

n1ghtmare_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The man really knows his porn.

Moral of the story is, if you spend the time you're watching porn on programming instead you would be a master of all these technologies.

Spending his time mastur-ing web technology fads is unlikely to be more productive than just watching the porn.