Have you ever wished there was one-character symbol for the word "pipe", like maybe '|'? Such a symbol would even make all those .'s and ()'s redundant. While we're at it, if our build script is going to be in its own specially-named file, wouldn't it be nice if instead of namespacing under 'gulp', within the special build script file there was a DSL where you could specify the task name and its dependencies with a single character, like ':'? And instead of 'function() { return ...; }', your instructions were delimited with just indentation, like a Tab character?
Your example proves the opposite of the point you're trying to make. Starting from your example and trying to compress it with a DSL, you literally couldn't do better than Make syntax: the "gulp.task('" part is implicit, the "', function() { return gulp.src(" part is a single character (':'), every ").pipe(" is a single character ('|'), and ").pipe(gulp.dest('...'))" is a single character ('>').
I submit that's impossible, simply because this stuff took 2 years to evolve...
Before and during the entirety of those 2 years Make has been a better tool, for those of us JS coders who didn't dismiss it offhand as being always thousands of lines and only for dinosaur C coders.
Make has many problems, but taking thousands of lines to simply pipe together commands has never been one of them. Having to write .pipe() where in shell you could just do '|' has never been one of them, either.
You mean like this?
Have you ever wished there was one-character symbol for the word "pipe", like maybe '|'? Such a symbol would even make all those .'s and ()'s redundant. While we're at it, if our build script is going to be in its own specially-named file, wouldn't it be nice if instead of namespacing under 'gulp', within the special build script file there was a DSL where you could specify the task name and its dependencies with a single character, like ':'? And instead of 'function() { return ...; }', your instructions were delimited with just indentation, like a Tab character?Your example proves the opposite of the point you're trying to make. Starting from your example and trying to compress it with a DSL, you literally couldn't do better than Make syntax: the "gulp.task('" part is implicit, the "', function() { return gulp.src(" part is a single character (':'), every ").pipe(" is a single character ('|'), and ").pipe(gulp.dest('...'))" is a single character ('>').
I submit that's impossible, simply because this stuff took 2 years to evolve...
Before and during the entirety of those 2 years Make has been a better tool, for those of us JS coders who didn't dismiss it offhand as being always thousands of lines and only for dinosaur C coders.
Make has many problems, but taking thousands of lines to simply pipe together commands has never been one of them. Having to write .pipe() where in shell you could just do '|' has never been one of them, either.