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Thanks for the great response!

I don't think I understand how HTML, CSS, and Javascript interaction makes Gulp development complicated. My CSS files are totally separate from my HTML/javascript, and are just included directly in my index.html. I use JSX with React to do inline HTML markup inside my .js files, which Babel handles just fine through its transform-react-jsx plugin, included easily in a one-line command in my Gulpfile which is just a very simple "babel" function call configurable via a regular .babelrc file.

Basically, I have yet to hit any limitations with the "build-is-code" philosophy, despite years of people telling me it's an awful and horrible thing to do. I can't forsee my <75 line Gulpfile growing too much, as the plugin ecosystem is robust and I already have all the features I could possibly want.

For reference, here is my simple Gulp setup. Each line is easily readable and explainable to anyone who knows basic Javascript (and a single Node.js primitive called "pipe").

As I asked another commentor: If you can point me to a clear tutorial on Make that lets me do all the things this Gulpfile does with extreme ease, I'll abandon Gulp and use Make exclusively for all front-end projects.

https://gist.github.com/c-johnson/b66d376b686c16efeb26484e89...




Probably you're finding it simple because your Gulp build script does nothing more than defer to Rollup - a module bundler like Webpack - to handle JavaScript bundling. You're literally just using Gulp to watch the file system and kick off either cssimport or Rollup on changes, which you barely even need Gulp to do.

Plus there's no incremental building - all CSS or JS is rebuilt on every save, your server doesn't build the project when it starts and it can't do things like hot module replacement or CSS injection - the latter of which BrowerSync can do.

I'm guessing you're using this on your smaller personal projects, where doing a complete rebuild on every save is fast enough not to be an issue, and reloading the page on every change won't be a pain when experimenting with new features or debugging complicated UI issues.




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