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

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

#151

Post by cnp »

joshuacc wrote: post #143
peterhunt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, exactly. A generally clear, new-developer-need-not-know style of `grunt dev` and you're out the door. And say the new dev needs to change something once he gets running? Hardly an issue. Just look at what is essentially, for most cases, JSON.

Grunts clarity has a ton to offer. With Gulp, while there are some speed increases, that clarity and DRY mentality disappears.

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

#152

Post by l0u »

newhouseb wrote: post #74
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…

It drives me nuts. I spend probably 1/5 of my time doing front-end (but have been around through all of the generations you mention) and after re-org after re-org I've finally settled on a build system with a Makefile and browserify to package things up that isn't an enormous monstrosity of 1000 different node packages and bajillion-step build progress. Frankly, I think that a large part the problems in front-end hav…

>People love to write build system after build system, in every field, a fetish I've never quite understood.

I have a firm suspicion its what writing a framework, cms, or blogging platform used to be.

In time the leader will show itself and people will get the message that this project is no longer fun and trendy.

I have to agree makefiles are pretty much the be all and end all when it comes to building projects. It offers pretty much all the power you could need.

The only plausible reason for makefiles to not be suitable for a culture brought up on shiny macbooks and "GUI's" would be that not many people want to deal with the complexity which comes from having that much power.

http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemnet/use/info/make/make_16...

Take this for example. Its pretty hard to look at let alone understand. That scare is probably reason enough alone for a bunch of wheel2.0s to be created. The 183 page plain text manual doesnt help much either. Its too daunting for today's culture.

Its just not about being correct and feature complete anymore, its about having the path of least resistance. Simple makefiles are simple, but nobody upvotes a hacker news article about how amazingly easy makefiles are.

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

#153

Post by parris »

Gulp seems more like a feature and less like a build system. In fact: http://blog.evanyou.me/2013/12/29/gulp-piping/ and https://github.com/wearefractal/vinyl-fs

Grunt works just fine. Make is probably ok once you learn it. It is a shame that we as a community don't take time to create amazing tutorials for our older tools like we do with our newer ones.

I think the main issue ends up being that github has created a double edged sword in open source dev land. You have people creating projects just so they can earn stars and thus resume fodder. This ends up creating packages with no maintainers and multiple projects that do the same thing. I mean really, how many different string parsing npm libraries do you need?

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

#154

Post by cdaven »

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…

What's the point of developing stuff in the first place? To make the world a better place, to learn things, to grow. Will that be accomplished so much better by switching from Perl to ASP to Ruby on Rails to Node.js to Go?

Look, there will always be a new tool|library|framework|language|paradigm that is cooler and better. If you pick the coolest language available today, you will be "so 2014" in a few years.

We need to be more pragmatic and use the tools that make our mission easier. Sometimes that mandates a complete rewrite in a new language|framework, but that is rare.

What the article calls "revolutionizing" is really not that big a deal. Maybe it makes things a bit easier, faster, prettier -- but it won't make or break your company.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

noname123 wrote: post #139
lstamour wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Isatmour, I apologize for offending you, I certainly didn't intend to impose pornography onto you nor condone porn addiction (for being a porn addict, I know that it is no laughing matter although I try to use humor to try to be honest and confront my issue). I guess I wanted to frame learning front-end framework as a kind of OCD/obsessive behavior similar to any positive or negative addition you or someone you know…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by lstamour »

noname123 wrote: post #139
lstamour wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Isatmour, I apologize for offending you, I certainly didn't intend to impose pornography onto you nor condone porn addiction (for being a porn addict, I know that it is no laughing matter although I try to use humor to try to be honest and confront my issue). I guess I wanted to frame learning front-end framework as a kind of OCD/obsessive behavior similar to any positive or negative addition you or someone you know…

Thanks, I accept your apology, though in improvement, I would focus on your writing. Habits are hard to change, but what you write is public and read by others. A careful eye (try not to post before going to bed) and use of the Edit button on HN can go a long way. Remember that not everyone has the same life and interests as you -- all we can assume is shared here is technology and business, so anything outside those realms spoken here is ... uncomfortable. I'd feel the same way if you'd talked about changes in filmmaking or fabric. Admittedly this was offensive, but it was more the bait-and-switch unexpected nature of it. I'm agreeing with what you wrote, everything's great, then paragraphs get longer and suddenly--Bam! It's not about technology but how the world is changing too fast. That's where you lost me. ;-)

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

#157

Post by dasil003 »

gcb0 wrote: post #142
dasil003 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> my comment still stands.

My analogy is one of the best in the history of ill-advised programming analogies, the more I think about it the better it gets (of course it may be lost on people who aren't mountain biking full-stack developers). Your comment on the other hand doesn't have a snarky leg to stand on.

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

#158

Post by gcb0 »

dasil003 wrote: post #157
gcb0 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> my comment still stands. My analogy is one of the best in the history of ill-advised programming analogies, the more I think about it the better it gets (of course it may be lost on people who aren't mountain biking full-stack developers). Your comment on the other hand doesn't have a snarky leg to stand on.

I could say i'm pretty good mountain biker who is laughing at road bikers discussing if shaving a beard would trim down enough weight to win a race or create more drag.

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

#159

Post by lowboy »

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?

Yeah. In the past three years I've gone from Windows, to a CentOS VM, to an Ubuntu VM, now on OS X. Node has worked on all of those platforms. I can't say the same for my .BAT files.

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

#160

Post by noname123 »

gcb0 wrote: post #158
dasil003 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my comment still stands. My analogy is one of the best in the history of ill-advised programming analogies, the more I think about it the better it gets (of course it may be lost on people who aren't mountain biking full-stack developers). Your comment on the other hand doesn't have a snarky leg to stand on.

I could say i'm pretty good mountain biker who is laughing at road bikers discussing if shaving a beard would trim down enough weight to win a race or create more drag.

As a neutral third party observer, I've enjoyed the exchange and only lament that if this was me at work, how much time I'd have spent on crafting the perfect comeback message to someone on the Internet and how much pride I've taken in my work and only to know in the deepest of my heart that it is only a "labor of love" like the sound of one hand clapping that no one'll ever hear or appreciate. Kudos to you both, gentlemen.
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