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Comment by asimuvPR | Hacker News Reader

The only way we are going to build better tools is to keep building them. Complaining about the sort of cambrian explosion going on right now on web development is short sighted. Ideas need to be discovered, explored and improved. Everything needs to be challenged. This is unknown territory in many ways. It does get a little hectic and tiring at times but that's the price we pay.

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The tools need to be better than what came before, rather than just different. So far I've dealt with grunt, then gulp, then webpack. None of these are appreciably better than make, they are just different and newer...

I disagree. With webpack you declare all dependencies are resolved and declared with code, instead of a separate manifest. It's a big improvement over gulp and grunt.

I don't know why people compare gulp and grunt with webpack, they solve different problems.

On the contrary: when looking for a global maximum you will almost certainly have to pass through local minima, so different _is_ good in this case.

You don't understand what webpack is. It's a module bundler. You use webpack in conjunction with make, grunt, gulp, or any other task runner or build system.

What do you use make, grunt, or gulp for in that case? My frontend build command is just "webpack". Everything necessary is handled in webpack.config.js.

They should definitely try to do things differently. Even when the end result is the same. The reason is simple: it provides an alternate point of view of the problem. Some issues only appear when we try to do things differently. Those issues might exist in the more common approach and be completely unknown.

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