Sigh. I had just about decided on using Browserify in my current projects (instead of Require.JS), and now I have to find out there's ANOTHER option... (Though looking at one comparison [1], I guess I'm sticking with Browserify moving forward.)
It does feel like information like this is siloed: Everyone talks about their own favorite solution, and few actually make intelligent comparisons. I didn't know about gulp until after I'd already set up grunt, for instance, and I don't really want to tell the team "now we're using gulp" after having selected grunt only two months ago. I hadn't even heard of Broccoli until just now, either. I obviously need a better JavaScript news feed.
That said, I don't feel a need to slam gulp or say grunt is great. But something that the article misses is that the kind of loud, rude argument that it describes is a basic, well-known psychological reaction to insecurity: The less self-confidence you have, the more you feel the need to be loud about your opinions. And I think a lot of JavaScript developers are insecure, based on the evidence.
Then you get aggressive opinionation about the projects, but really that's a secondary phenomenon.
One problem is there are no objective metrics for framework or language quality. I don't think anyone knows if objective metrics are even possible, never mind how they would work.
So you pretty much just make a choice that works for you and stay with it until something obviously much better comes along.
And if it doesn't - if it's obviously much different, but not so obviously better - you can still be getting useful work done.
The seductive promise is that Framework X will make the job take half as long and produce half the bugs.
I doubt that's ever true in practice, for general values of X, especially when you consider learning/retooling time.
Actually, the main reason I was feeling like I might want to switch from Grunt to Gulp was the extreme and measurable time difference between running the two. Honestly the "it's easier to set up!" arguments fall somewhat flat; it's not HARD to set up Grunt, and you don't need to do it often, so that stinks of "premature optimization." Broccoli seems to entirely be about how clean and tiny the configuration files are; not interesting, because that means it's actually harder to understand how to change them to do something the designers didn't expect. If it's even possible.
It does feel like each group has their own little fiefdom and they want you to use THEIR tool rather than a competitor. The Grunt main page says "THE JAVASCRIPT TASK RUNNER", as if there are no other options. As a new JavaScript developer, it made me think that was just the only option.
I am much more impressed with the integrity of open source projects that actively advertise the options -- especially when they cite advantages and disadvantages of the options. Actively misdirecting you to believe that there no options is pretty much the opposite of that philosophy.
It does feel like information like this is siloed: Everyone talks about their own favorite solution, and few actually make intelligent comparisons. I didn't know about gulp until after I'd already set up grunt, for instance, and I don't really want to tell the team "now we're using gulp" after having selected grunt only two months ago. I hadn't even heard of Broccoli until just now, either. I obviously need a better JavaScript news feed.
That said, I don't feel a need to slam gulp or say grunt is great. But something that the article misses is that the kind of loud, rude argument that it describes is a basic, well-known psychological reaction to insecurity: The less self-confidence you have, the more you feel the need to be loud about your opinions. And I think a lot of JavaScript developers are insecure, based on the evidence.
[1] http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/browserify-vs-webpack
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection