Why don't people just use make?
Also the learning curve is just not as easy, nor the files as readable. With Gulp and Grunt you are exploiting the fact that almost everyone can write a couple of lines of JavaScript. The only thing you are adding is an api composed of three to four functions.
If you look at make on the other hand, you'll need to learn quite a lot.
It's a bit disapointing when you have a very good multiplatform ecosystem to see stuff like that, sometimes it's people "forgetting" there's also windows (and I can get that), but some other times it's just a big "fuck you windows user".
I'm talking here about pure javascript npm packages, something you can legitimatly expect to be able to build on windows and yet some people make childish judgements on windows users and choose tools which exclude a part of the community (not always the case or the reason but it happens).
On a similar subject, I stopped counting the times I've seen someone get told to get a Mac when discussing a problem on cross platform tools.
Each make has it own set of extensions outside of what POSIX requires.
Additionally, for almost every task you need to call out to external tools that also have their own set of compatibility issues across UNIX/POSIX systems.
Ideally everyone writing a Make script would need to read the POSIX standard and only use common features, but since that isn't the case, scripts break across systems.
This is what lead to autotools/autoconf creation.
How many realistic development choices fall in that category? Is anyone actually doing development on IRIX or UNICOS?
There are lots of POSIX systems out there.
For years, the front page of Ant had a rant towards Makefiles on it, including this highly unprofessional quote: '"Is my command not executing because I have a space in front of my tab!!!" said the original author of Ant way too many times.'
https://web.archive.org/web/20100203102803/http://ant.apache...
They only removed it in 2010 with the release of 1.8.0.
I'm reminded of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767
Sure.
...but to be fair, regardless of the make syntax, you've also got to look at the history of make, and what it's designed to achieve.
Make is for executing shell commands on file patterns with dependency rules.
It's not designed to use an ecosystem of plugins or have long running processes (eg. to run a local server or watch for file changes). It's not designed to be a scripting language (although it can be, since it's technically turing complete).
Now, when you look at other things which have come along to replace make as a build tool: cmake, grunt, gulp, ant, rake, maven, scons, premake, etc.
I think it's probably a little bit superscillious to suggest that all the people building these tools were just too retarded to realize how good make was.
More likely, they had specific needs that make didn't address.
Rust, for example, just recently had a reasonable make based solution, but they decided to depreciate it in favour of cargo, because it was simply too difficult to support in an appropriate cross platform manner.
Make isn't a bad tool; for very doing some specific things. Specifically building c code on unix-ish systems.
Is it the right tool for fetching the dependencies of and invoking a large set of ruby/javascript/python scripts and plugins to build the assets for a website, running a local development server and watching file changes and pushing livereload changes to the browser as the files change?
No. Make is absolutely rubbish at doing those things.
...not because make is rubbish, but because it's not for doing those sorts of things.
Yep absolutely. Make is a system for generating files from other files, it is that simple. Compiling templates and code, generating source maps, concatenating, minifying -- many of these tasks all fall under that umbrella.
> It's not designed to use an ecosystem of plugins or have long running processes (eg. to run a local server or watch for file changes).
You're right, I wouldn't advocate that either. Procfiles and tools like foreman (and it's various reimplementations, like honcho) are for managing those processes: development servers, file watchers, etc. That's actually my own personal approach, I go for the Makefile/Procfile combo and run `foreman start` to boot up the a server and any other processes that project might need. Works pretty well for me.
> Make isn't a bad tool; for very doing some specific things. Specifically building c code on unix-ish systems.
That's a pretty narrow view, like I said earlier, it's good for any application where you're generating files from other files. Building an ebook, managing unwieldy SSH configurations (smdh at lack of include directive in SSH config), etc.
So yeah I agree make is no good at being an all-in-one everything-and-the-kitchen-sink suite. And that's great. It has one job and does it well enough, and is even better complemented by other tools. Some people like the suite approach better, but I wouldn't disparage make for something it wasn't intended to do to begin with.
[0]: http://ddollar.github.io/foreman/ [1]: http://entrproject.org/ [2]: https://www.npmjs.org/package/livereload