[andrewchambers]

Maybe I am missing something, but it seems like most of theses tools are working around the fact the windows doesn't come with make by default.

They are essentially reinventing the wheel for web developers who have never worked from the command line before.

[falcolas]

There's a lot of distaste for make as well, typically centered on the limitations of the dependency and .PHONY targets.

I rarely find them to be limitations for my projects, but there's certainly a reason so many different build systems have been built, even for Linux.

[brandonmenc]

I've written both makefiles and gulpfiles.

Yeah, I guess you can get make to do the exact same things as gulp, but gulp already does what a web developer needs, in a language they already know, with a massive plugin ecosystem you don't have to re-implement in shell.

[andrewchambers]

A plug in system is nice. I didn't say it was totally bad, I just think its interesting.