[matthewmacleod]

I'm not sure that's a convincing argument – you will in almost every conceivable case have a build pipeline in place anyway, so there's not really a cost there.

[Touche]

I don't set up a "build pipeline" until I'm sure the app is going to deployed to a production environment. Why would I set up a build for what is essentially a fiddle, or if I'm just experimenting? The now-common workflow where people write build scripts at the start of a new project is just bizarre to me.

[iopq]

Sure, and why do people use C anyway? You can write binary directly without any kind of make utility.

[recursive]

Probably because machine code is not very human comprehensible.

[iopq]

Neither is minimized JavaScript

[mistercow]

You're partially right, but every build step has a cost when you're working on a large project.