[andypants]

I didn't downvote you, but I use nodejs and I've never needed to use grunt.

I don't think grunt is as pervasive as npm in the world of node.js.

[hexasquid]

Grunt is just generally a helpful little task runner and good for automating many things in general web development - running tests, concatenation / minification, linting, HTML / CSS / JS preprocessing and so on, if that floats your boat. It really is worth giving it a go.

[andypants]

Well, makefiles have worked fine for me so far.

[jdlshore]

You might like Jake, then. It's a Node.js version of Rake (which is a ruby version of make).

[willurd]

Maybe that's where the confusion was. I was talking about browser development. Thanks.