Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenneth | Hacker News Reader

I simply use Make for all my web projects, whether it's a Ruby JSON API, or a React front-end. It's reliable, pre-installed everywhere, and can wrap anything in one consistent CLI. Why have to remember whether to type lein repl, pry, or rails console, when make repl will do everytime? Ditto, bundle install, npm install, lein deps => make deps. make server can easily wrap whatever command launches the server, make dev can easily use a filesystem watching tool to restart make server on any change. And beyond that, make can be used as usual to "compile" the project, ie. run whatever static analysis and preprocessing is necessary in the web world (jshint, jsx etc.).

View on HN

We default to Make too since we're all (all two of us) running a *nix OS. I'm currently sub-contracting for an agency with devs all running Windows so I'm hoping `npm run` works well enough. If I had it my way I'd just tell them to install MinGW but they might take that as me telling them to go fuck themselves.

keep in mind that make isn't going to work on Windows. For a lot of people, that's okay (including myself). Still, a ton of developers still work on Windows.

Actually make isn't even fully portable across POSIX systems.

Unless you make sure only to use these features

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/mak...

Same thing for any external tool used in the scripts.

Thankfully most of us can safely disregard all but a tiny subset of POSIX-like systems.

And its different for Windows users who want to use Grunt, how exactly?

It's different in the way that it's trivial to use npm to install grunt and run builds on Windows, but not trivial to get a Makefile to run (if you don't want to resort to running cygwin bashs all the time).

You can't use make to install grunt on Windows?

You have to install make some how. That's the problem. You're tying all these cross platform tools together with something that isn't cross platform. Grats.

You can make your life difficult if you so desire, but you can also simply install Cygwin and be happy.

my recollection from my windows times, is that cygwin is a pain to install and slow too, so there is no free lunch.

> is a pain to install

They have a setup.exe that downloads the components you select. I gather it's not as painless as "apt-get install cygwin" would be, but it's as painless as installing Windows software is.

> and slow too

They are painting a Linux-environment on top of a Windows OS. That's no small feat. In return you get a sensible file space, a decent command line and all the development tools you'd need on Linux. It's slower than a Linux box running on the metal, but it's as fast as a VM would be and has direct access to the host operating system (and, for me, a working Python environment where I can simply say "pip install ipython" and everything just works. I would not even consider working from Windows without it.

Make works great in cygwin.

> Why have to remember whether to type lein repl, pry, or rails console, when make repl will do everytime?

This is why I don't think the CLI is a very efficient interface for operating the computer. There are more commands than you can remember so, you're forced to take the commands that you can't remember or be bothered to type in and stick them into a file, thereby creating new commands that must be identified, understood and remembered by the next developer who should really only use them if they know all of the original commands in the file.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com