snprbob86 on Introducing Grunt

I'm not sure why people are afraid of Makefiles. I know an incredible number of developers who view them as this scary black box. They are not a heavy weight thing which justify making excuses about not producing.

Here's what it takes to make a new Javascript project:

    mkdir project
    cd project
    touch foo.js bar.js
    echo -e 'project.js: foo.js bar.js\n\tcat $^ > $@' > Makefile

Unless you're jQuery, you don't need minification or GZipping because clients of your library already have their own. You don't need your own linting because you can trivially run `jshint project.js`.

If you find yourself running the same command in your shell a bunch of times, add it to your Makefile. It's that simple.

bentruyman 14y

As someone who is not afraid of Makefiles (and has used them by default in past JavaScript-based projects), I welcome tools like Grunt to my projects. It fits in well with the types of "build" tasks I'm typically invoking in my JavaScript projects — and done so in a much simpler and abstracted syntax I prefer to work with.

Also, based on your comments, I think you and I have different definitions of "simple". :)

snprbob86 14y

I'm using Rich Hickey's definition: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

You might be using it to mean what he's defined as "easy".

Comments