Grunt is solid, and does a great job at helping front end devs do their work. For people just getting into using a task runner, there are a lot of tutorials and S/O questions out there to help them learn as well.
I did not know about the "hate" before visiting this thread... and I don't get it and now feel a bit sad reading all this. I was using Makefiles, npm commands and custom scripts for quite a while, and they were a pain to maintain! With Grunt I can just throw in a couple of plugins and I'm good to go! I'm using it for more than just building my apps.. I do all configuration and generation of new source-files etc with it, and it is awesome.
<3
May whatever supernatural entities you believe in be with you, man. I deeply, deeply thank you for your work.
I also gave a presentation at our partner conference a year and a half ago on using grunt for development. Keep up the great work!
Noted. : )
Edit: again, now that we have a bunch of people capable of understanding trendy JS here: Care to share a link to somewhere I can learn?
I don't hate grunt, I used to love it and used it for all my projects. And then I started using gulp.
But after reading this article I just use npm script 99% of the time. I don't know if it is better over all, I just prefer it over grunt/gulp.
I see a lot of comments are basically saying our project is obsolete or sucks. That does not stop us from working on Grunt though.
We are still seeing record download numbers, even with the 2 year old releases. This is why we felt it was important to keep releasing this software and supporting developers.
For those who support and use Grunt - huge thank you! Pick up your free open-source copy made by volunteers on npm.