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Make for hipsters

mattandre.ws

71–80 of 200 posts

Re: Make for hipsters

#71
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose so. But there are always many tools for everything. And everyone can select his favorite.

The problem is if you want support (even commercial help) you'll need to follow some kind of prevailing trend. If I've got a system with grunt or gulp and I need help, I can probably find a local web developer. I'm not so sure if I can find someone who's an expert in Makefiles at the moment.

Seriously? The most used build tool in existence... and you don't think you can find someone who knows it?

...That may be the source of your problems if your devs are that inexperienced!

Re: Make for hipsters

#72
post #69
post #10

Do so many people who go on this site not know how to make makefiles? Also why is it for hipsters? Or is the article for hipsters? Why does the author call his own published notes factually inaccurate? Why is it hacky to use a makefile? Is this all a big ruse?

Most people are probably writing web based apps in higher level languages that don't require make files. ("Hipsters" sounds like a dig at Ruby / Node devs to me).

Quite possibly, though I think most of the hipsters have left Ruby by this point.

For my part, as a Ruby developer, I detest rake and tend to write makefiles for my Ruby projects instead.

Re: Make for hipsters

#73
Pop make quiz: what is the difference between these two Makefiles?

----------------------------------------------------

foo: bar

bar:

----------------------------------------------------

.PHONY: foo

foo:

Re: Make for hipsters

#76
post #10

Do so many people who go on this site not know how to make makefiles? Also why is it for hipsters? Or is the article for hipsters? Why does the author call his own published notes factually inaccurate? Why is it hacky to use a makefile? Is this all a big ruse?

Every time I encounter the hodgepodge mess of bower, npm, grunt and gulp scripts that our front-end developers have erected to compile their javascript, I really wish they had taken the half-hour to learn make, instead of all of these other tools that don't work quite the same and do about half of what make will do.

Re: Make for hipsters

#77
post #58
post #10

Do so many people who go on this site not know how to make makefiles? Also why is it for hipsters? Or is the article for hipsters? Why does the author call his own published notes factually inaccurate? Why is it hacky to use a makefile? Is this all a big ruse?

Unfortunately, many developers have a mortal fear of anything from before the year 2000. They've grown up with this tribal wisdom of unix and it's various tools being a beardy wilderness of byzantine hacks and toxic waste dumps. Meanwhile they'll merrily pile up a thousand node modules into a towering pillar of bad, just to run the equivalent of a shell one-liner, and call it a job well done.

There are far more developers who will jump on the latest new shiny with no good reason.

Re: Make for hipsters

#78
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose so. But there are always many tools for everything. And everyone can select his favorite.

The problem is if you want support (even commercial help) you'll need to follow some kind of prevailing trend. If I've got a system with grunt or gulp and I need help, I can probably find a local web developer. I'm not so sure if I can find someone who's an expert in Makefiles at the moment.

The main issue is that the prevailing trend in web development changes every six months. I wonder how many developers that know grunt you will find in 3 years.

Re: Make for hipsters

#79
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not be sound harsh, but your problem lies here My personal preference for everything is spaces You want a tool that has been around longer than you do stuff your way. I think it is better if learn to work with the tools and accept that there is a reason some things work in certain ways.

I've already configured my editors and tools to work with Make, and I'm not so much complaining about Make here as I am pointing out one of its most annoying warts. I am a pretty heavy Make user and I think it's great (not least of which because it's so darn ubiquitous). And, not to sound harsh, but if you always "accept that there is a reason some things work in certain ways" without questioning if there may be a be…

Given the downvotes I assume this is a very touchy subject to some people here...

Anyway, are you saying that accepting a tools established input format is to go with the status quo? I am all for breaking new grounds, but is this one really a priority?

Re: Make for hipsters

#80
post #37
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) I imagine quite a lot of this site's visitors use different platforms/toolchains, and haven't encountered make. (2) Its a fun/joke title, the article is for "hipsters", the kind who know the latest fancy build tools but not make, I suppose. I wouldn't take it too seriously. (3) It's a disclaimer against people attacking him for errors, and also to warn people that he's not an expert. Again, this is written in a l…

If not a ruse, this is a dumb post that discredits itself and calls makefiles hacky, not noticing that they are used by many people for most native programming on most (unix type) platforms. I'm feeling cranky every day, but just today this post is at the top of hacker news, and that's frustrating.

Why would it frustrate you that this is something people want to learn?

There are plenty of valid reasons why an established developer would never use Make, namely integration with the rest of their 'ecosystem'. Also, there's plenty of reasons for everyone to get in and use Make where appropriate.

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