211–220 of 525 posts
After going through a few build systems for Javascript, I realized they were all reinventing the wheel in one way or the other, and pulled out venerable Make from the closet. It turned out to be way more expressive and easy to read. One target to build (prod), another to run with fsevents doing auto-rebuild when a file is saved (instant gratification during dev), then a few targets for cleaup & housekeeping. All said…
Wish this article was about just make rather than JavaScript and using it in tandem
I used make heavily in the 80s and 90s, but haven't much since then. Recently I started a project that had source files getting processed into PDF files, for use by humans. Since this is the 21st century, those files have spaces in their names. At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile. A little searching reveals that the consensus on usi…
Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one? While you are allowing spaces, you probabaly are allowing all possible code points or maybe even a null byte? Thinking about it gives me headaches. I hate hearing people using 21st century or modern as…
I used make heavily in the 80s and 90s, but haven't much since then. Recently I started a project that had source files getting processed into PDF files, for use by humans. Since this is the 21st century, those files have spaces in their names. At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile. A little searching reveals that the consensus on usi…
Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one? While you are allowing spaces, you probabaly are allowing all possible code points or maybe even a null byte? Thinking about it gives me headaches. I hate hearing people using 21st century or modern as…
No. He's right, you're wrong, hzhou321. We want spaces in filenames. We even want UTF-8 if possible. We don't want crude tools that cannot handle the most basic names. You can argue all you want, this is a very very basic demand that could be met with very very basic tools but make is just too crude.
People like you are exactly the cancer in the developer community that argues away reasonable demands like spaces in filenames and perpetuates the garbage legacy tools we have.
I used make heavily in the 80s and 90s, but haven't much since then. Recently I started a project that had source files getting processed into PDF files, for use by humans. Since this is the 21st century, those files have spaces in their names. At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile. A little searching reveals that the consensus on usi…
Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one? While you are allowing spaces, you probabaly are allowing all possible code points or maybe even a null byte? Thinking about it gives me headaches. I hate hearing people using 21st century or modern as…
Users expect computers to work in a non-surprising ways.
It isn't natural to use dashes or underscore in file names. Training users to be afraid of spaces is just teaching them one more way that computers are scary and unpredictable.
Meanwhile over in Windows land, all tools have been expected to deal with spaces in them for what is approaching 20 years.
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They must have got something good though. Else why would there entire families of C-like languages ? Plus, to me C syntax is particularly good. You're writing real words and the computers does the things you tell it to. To the letter.
The nice thing about C is that it's a great cross-platform assembly language. I wouldn't call its syntax good or bad.
Is it though? It's definitely available on a huge number of platforms, but are the implementations compatible?
And even if they are, there is so much undefined behavior that taking advantage of the cross-platform nature is not nearly as easy as it should be.
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> It actually doesn't know anything at all about how to build C, C++, or any other kind of code. I guess it depends on how you define "know", but there are implicit rules. $ cat foo.c #include int main() { printf("Hello\n"); return 0; } $ cat Makefile foo: foo.c $ make cc -O2 -pipe foo.c -o foo $ ./foo Hello
Fun fact: your Makefile above is redundant. You can delete it entirely, and the implicit rules you're using here continue to work just fine.
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Like, for example? To be serious, those are sort of contrived. "Sending a notification" isn't something you want to be managing as state at all. What you probably mean is that you want to send that notification once, on an "official" build. And that requires storing the fact that the notification was sent and a timestamp somewhere (like, heh, a file). And as for building into a database... that just seems weird to me…
I need to send an email every time a log file updates, just the tail, simple make file: send: foo.log tail foo.log | email watch make send Crap, it keeps sending it. Ok, so you work out some scheme involving temporary files which act as guards against duplicate processing. Or you write a script which conditionally sends the email by storing the hash of the previous transmission and comparing it against the hash of th…
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> Make has deeply woven into it the assumption that the product of workflows are files, and that the way you can tell the state of a file is by its last modification date. I've always wondered whether Make would be seen as less of a grudging necessity, and more of an elegant panacea, if operating systems had gone the route of Plan 9, where everything is— symbolically —a file, even if it's not a file in the sense of "…
> everything is—symbolically—a file How are you going to make the result of a join in a relational database into a file, symbolically or otherwise?
A file that represents the temporary table that has been created. Naming it is harder, unless the SQL query writer was feeling nice and verbose.