[maaaats]

You (and the rest of the comments to your post) miss the point: Now you need grunt, a gruntfile, the tools for the build process and grunt specific wrappers.

What you instead could have had was a simple script running the tools with the proper command line arguments.

[jaredklewis]

Are you also against make, cmake, mvn, rake, etc...?

Those tools could also be replaced with custom scripts, but programmers in every language seem to agree that build tools make the job easier.

I don't think grunt or gulp are perfect, but do think they make writing, organizing, and reusing build tasks easier.

So are just against gulp/grunt, or really are opposed to the whole idea of a JavaScript build tool?

[matsemann]

Strawman... I'm neither against build tools nor the idea of a js build tool.

Make would basically just run CLI in this instance, so it's exactly what I like. I like maven, but I hate when I need a special maven plugin for the tool I want to use. All these tools expose a nice CLI that can be used, no need to complicate it by adding more abstractions. If it weren't for how Grunt can watch files, I would have scrapped it for our project. Because the config Gruntfile for our build process is impossible to understand and maintain, but the end results are just some simple commands to various tools.