<i>Things should remain backward compatible but only for a very short window, it&#x27;s really unhelpful to have many many different ways of doing the same thing, it fragments everything including the learning curve. Witness Perl.</i><p>Sounds like a terrible way to build commercial software.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t that old things don&#x27;t die away quickly - far from it - the problem is that we have too many new things coming in that keep changing every few days.<p>I&#x27;m building a 10k line coffeescript app that works on top of react.
All I care about is getting a toolchain to compile the coffeescript and generate source maps.<p>I don&#x27;t care about dicking around with npm and node and grunt other than to make the build process work.<p>Tell me why I should care about grunt or gulp or webpack?<p>React introduces a massive win over traditional ways of building UIs that makes learning how to write  apps with it worth learning. Why should I care about learning grunt and then learning gulp and then learning webpack, when all I&#x27;m using it for is to compile my coffeescript?<p>If I could get away with a Makefile, I probably would.