[esailija]

It is nothing like that. Npm/node is the task runner and you are not doing anything yourself that you wouldn't have to do with grunt/gulp anyway. They are the equivalent of making a function like `add(a, b) { return a + b; }` instead of just using the `+` operator that is already there, it is nothing like jQuery vs "raw javascript".

[talmand]

Not that I disagree, but it seems you simplified things a bit much as compared to the subject at hand.

Plus, I've never heard of npm/node as being described as a task runner. I would appreciate an explanation as to what you mean by that.

[esailija]

Did you even read the article? You can define tasks in package.json and use `npm run ...` instead of defining them in gruntfile and using `grunt ...`

[talmand]

I don't understand the negativity here, I simply stated I've never heard of it described that way. I'm only asking for information here. I guess I have to apologize that I don't necessarily and automatically equate scripts as the same as a task runner. Please refer to my original post where I clearly stated I'm new to this environment. That would include terminology as well.

[mercer]

I can understand the frustration because the whole point of the article and the discussions here is that using the scripts functionality of NPM is equivalent to using a task runner, and, according to some here (including myself) superior in most cases.

But you're right that it's maybe not immediately obvious unless you've already played around with the scripts functionality and task runners in general. And I suppose you do need to have a basic familiarity with the concept of piping data from one unix command to another, running commands in sequence or parallel, the difference between "&", "&&", ";", and "|" etc. Not to mention the difference between STDERR and STDOUT which I still don't fully master. Thankfully this has almost never been an issue in practice.

That said, I strongly suggest you take this opportunity to continue diving into this issue and maybe trying out both approaches yourself. My own experience getting into the node ecosystem and back-end stuff has been that I wasted countless hours on figuring out task runners, solving weird bugs and issues, switching from grunt to gulp, where I could have avoided all that by learning how to use the npm scripts functionality instead.

As a bonus, becoming more familiar with *nix approach to stringing together commands has been incredibly useful for many other things! For example, I've been able to replace certain scripts (backups, ftp synchronization, data conversion) with much simpler solutions that rely on this OS-wide functionality.