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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there is a lot of shit, but stick to ES2015+ and you'll be mostly fine. No reason to continue with the .cjs .mjs crap. Either set "type": "module" or use Deno (the superior option) and don't look back. If others still want to use Common JS, that's their problem. Yeah, a lot of modules won't work out of the box because they're Common JS, and visa versa, but screw Common JS. That and goofy junkware like Gulp and Grunt which are overcomplicated, change their APIs frequently, and don't really do anything better than a Makefile. Ok, Gulp might be helpful if you're running Windows, but I pity those who still do web development on Windows without WSL2.

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Gulp and Grunt? Are you a time traveler from 2012?

Both still work fine to this day. I don't know what the exact (dis)advantages of the competing toolsets are, but if you know Gulp and Grunt then I don't see why you wouldn't use them.

Was helping an org migrate off of CloudFoundry and Grunt gave us no end of trouble. In the end, we wound up building with Node 8(!) and then praying that everything would still work with a 12.x runtime.

unless one is in need of piping files (and streams) in a complex and prolific way, npm scripts or a makefile can supplant Gulp/Grunt with much less overhead.

Yeah Grunt is pretty ancient but Gulp is still used in many places.

Gulp it's really useful when your workflow gets out of what webpack, esbuild & cia expects

Look at the source code of web.dev site :-) It's Eleventy with gulp for asset management.

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev

I worked on a project using Gulp and Grunt as recently as 2020.

This was a product the company I was working for inherited from a merger. They bought the company for this product.

It was a nightmare of bad software practices. Still using Gulp in 2020 was only the tip of the iceberg.

At least (I hope) you weren't still using Bower.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ used to build Typescript: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/Gulpfile.j...

That is freaking bananas. Thanks for sharing.

Gulp is practical to insert extra behavior if you have a multi-step build process and are allergic to Webpack. Just write a gulpfile and spawn whatever you need spawning, like some glorified bash that is already in JS so you don't need to manage more languages.

2012 === bad. 2022 == awesome!

Problem is that a ton of random stuff breaks when you "type": "module". Unexpected stuff, like Prettier.

Oh no, whatever will the world do without Prettier turning nicely formatted JS into a pile of unreadable shit because line 218 was 71 characters long instead of 69.

I’ve recently had a PR that Prettier would add 2 extra whitespace and Lint would complain about it. And these were in the same build process. The resolution was for me to change my code…

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