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Comment by j4ship | Hacker News Reader

why are we not just using bash scripts ???

-you can log output -perfectly capable of handling your unique build style -no setup (pretty much) -just call the command lines of other tools like (less.c, yui-compressor.jar ... etc) for compliation tasks

talk about over engineering. The thing is that the reason we dont have 1 to rule them all now is because no one has ever objectively argued why one is better than the other.

If we could just get command line equilvalents for things like ember-cli that didnt require npm then we would be good. Npm is the thing holing us back , we dont need it to do command line processing. Its a bloated middle man. Please command line tool gods , offer your tool outside of the javascript eco system. Build it in java and export to jar or c and allow us to worry about the stitching

Question , what is the thing npm/grunt/gulp gives us that cannot be done with bash, if all the tools we used were command line executables?

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I think you may be confusing npm with something else? npm is a package manager, and it does run as a command line tool. Similar to how apt-get is the command-line frontend for a package ecosystem. npm also includes npx, which allows you to directly run any command line utility in the npm ecosystem without installing the package first.

Try running `npx ember-cli` directly in your terminal.

all you say is correct but im not confused. node and npm is require to run many command line tools (grunt, gulp ...etc). I think this is an unnecessary overhead if we could get these tools to just be built as standalone command line tools and then we can just use bash. Im asking for a particular feature that comes from this environment that I dont have in bash? Why do I need this environment.

I have a sense that webpack is the same, its a bloated environment. I dont need an all in one solution for a build process. Just give me the tools, ill use bash and call it a day. So Im just asking, is there something Im missing? What is the feature from these environments that I can directly preform by calling a script from bash? Why cant we just pull that script out into a command line tool and then devs can use it to their liking, pipe its output to a folder, cat that file to soemthing else, call another tool to minify the results, move all the contents to the dist folder.

Node just doesnt seem to give me any more power as a dev (build wise), why is it so important to the space.

Hats off to frontend engineers, the space has evolved to something respectable but I feel like over engineering is a pursuit of community. Its like they keep making new tools, to encapsulate more features and then post on HN and say "Look at this cool new way to do things that fixes that problem you really didnt have".

No ones webpack was bottlenecking their work, im guessing you can choose what to build and when so you dont have to do a full build every time. No one is going to choose a build system because of its blazing speed. I would rather not have people work on these problems that dont really need to be solved.

> npm is require to run many command line tools (grunt, gulp ...etc)

You seem to be looking for the ability to run JS tooling (builders, transpilers, minifiers) as common command line utilities. That seems to be entirely possible and I'm not sure why you're making the distinction. I can pipe input between all of them, include them in bash scripts, make files, whatever else you're used to.

There's no meaningful distinction between a "standalone command line tool" and a command line tool that is written in node. If I added webpack (for example) to an ubuntu package repository, you could do `apt-get install webpack`, and have a "standalone" command line utility without ever downloading it from npm. It would have to pull other ubuntu packages as dependencies, but that's standard practice for installing something these days.

Unless you're wondering about packaging it into linux. In which case I'm just as confused as you are.

Node is a runtime, npm is a package manager. Together they let you download code (js or otherwise) and run it.

This is the same as Java (JVM), .NET (CLR), and plenty of other languages. You can compile to a native assembly if you like (similar to C++ or Go) but it's not necessary when you have fast runtimes and JIT compilation.

Everything you listed for functionality is possible today - while also letting people write and ship code to multiple platforms quickly.

You can totally do all of this. There are projects that just pipe the output of Babel into uglifyjs into a file and call it a day. You still “need” to use npm to install those packages though. npm puts command line utilities in node_modules/.bin to not pollute your machine. npm just stores packages as tar.gz files though, so if you wanted to you could wget them yourself.

> Why cant we just pull that script out into a command line tool and then devs can use it to their liking, pipe its output to a folder, cat that file to soemthing else, call another tool to minify the results, move all the contents to the dist folder.

I guess because everyone needs to do those steps, so why not have a single command that does it for you. Sure, you could write your own and have everyone maintain thousands of different random shell scripts all eventually doing the same thing, but why?

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