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The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

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Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#241

Post by to3m »

hzhou321 wrote: post #222
debaserab2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the merit of spaces in file names matter? You still will need to deal with files with spaces in the real world. If your tooling doesn't support it, it's a non-starter for many.

What about real world is that in real world, it is not context-free. There are real world situations -- such as selling a word processor to general public (especially) including clueless -- you need to deal with files with spaces, period. But there are real world situations -- such as Makefiles -- requires users to learn the tool, to be able to handle certain tricky situations themselves and excludes incompetents. An…

I'm bemused by this repeated insistence that supporting spaces in file names is somehow difficult.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#242

Post by hzhou321 »

coldtea wrote: post #231
hzhou321 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile over in Windows land, all tools have been expected to deal with spaces in them for what is approaching 20 years. That is an excellent example that deserves a second look from a different aspect. ... it has trained a crop of computer users that are afraid of command lines and with an attitude of anything beneath the GUI interface is owned by and of someone else's problem. They are scared of computers more…

Which is not a problem. The command line was only one, historical UI. Not the be-all end-all of UIs, and there's no reason it should be of any real interest to modern desktop users (non devs). And I cut my teeth as a developer on DOS, Sun OS (pre-Solaris), and HP-UX, and early Linux back in the day.

> Which is not a problem. The command line was only one, historical UI. Not the be-all end-all of UIs,

A similar trend is happening in electronic communication: from letter to email, to text, to emoji's. The text is just one historical communication way and there's no reason it should be of any real interest to modern communicator as long as we have emojis ... wait, we've been there before.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#243

Post by com2kid »

hzhou321 wrote: post #227
com2kid wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And there are solutions. One solution, from those who don't code, seems to demand ("developers", paid or not) that every tool that deal with files should handle this additional complexity, regardless of their context and what they think. 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…

> Meanwhile over in Windows land, all tools have been expected to deal with spaces in them for what is approaching 20 years. That is an excellent example that deserves a second look from a different aspect. ... it has trained a crop of computer users that are afraid of command lines and with an attitude of anything beneath the GUI interface is owned by and of someone else's problem. They are scared of computers more…

> it has trained a crop of computer users that are afraid of command lines and with an attitude of anything beneath the GUI interface is owned by and of someone else's problem.

There is nothing beneath the Windows UI interface. The GUI is the primary subsystem of Windows, the command line is a separate subsystem. Windows has traditionally been built up around the Win32 API, which is GUI first.

It is of course possible to do things from the command line, and some advanced stuff may need the command line, but users should never need to drop out of the UI unless something has gone horribly wrong.

The Windows UI is incredibly powerful, with advanced diagnostic and logging capabilities, incredible performance monitoring tools, and system hooks everywhere that allow the entire UI to be modified and changed in almost any way imaginable.

The way Services work on Windows is not some (hotly debated) config files. It is through a UI. Management of hardware takes place through a UI. Pretty much everything short of running Ping has a UI around it.

I love the command line, if I am developing it is how I primarily work. And while doing so, younger devs look at me like I am crazy because they have customized the living daylights out of their UI tools (VS Code, Atom), to do amazing things that exceed what a command line can do, and of course those editors have a command line built in for when that is the best paradigm!

> and having it heavily disguised as an appliance is mandatory.

Something working so well that it becomes an appliance isn't a bad thing. It means the engineers who made it have put in so many fail safes and worked to make the code of high enough quality that it doesn't fall apart around itself all the time.

Heaven forbid I can upgrade my installed software and not have some random package break my entire system.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#244

Post by hzhou321 »

Chlorus wrote: post #238
coldtea wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not a problem. The command line was only one, historical UI. Not the be-all end-all of UIs, and there's no reason it should be of any real interest to modern desktop users (non devs). And I cut my teeth as a developer on DOS, Sun OS (pre-Solaris), and HP-UX, and early Linux back in the day.

Almost every CLI program I've ever used in Windows has no problem with spaces in filenames, so I don't exactly why he's fixated on the GUI... But I had forgotten, computers aren't useful as tools to accomplish work, but as mechanisms to assuage intellectual inferiority complexes. He should advocate for punch cards again, since that would certainly stop morons from using computers.

> Almost every CLI program I've ever used in Windows has no problem with spaces in filenames, so I don't exactly ...

Just to clarify on what we think as problem could differ:

    C:\Users\hzhou>ls *.txt
    new  2.txt

    C:\Users\hzhou>ls new  2.txt
    ls: new: No such file or directory
    ls: 2.txt: No such file or directory

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#245

Post by CogitoCogito »

scbrg wrote: post #233
zer00eyz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile. I don't understand why one would think that make would be a good tool for this... > 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, a…

> I don't understand why one would think that make would be a good tool for this... Why not? To me, it sounds like a perfect use of Make. You have a number of files that should be processed somehow (presumably by invoking a certain tool for each and every file) and produce another set of files. Whether it's C-files to compiled binaries, or some source files to PDF:s, make seems very well suited for the job. Except ye…

Yeah make seems like a great first tool to grab in this case. But apparently some of the requirements of this current usecase don't play well with make. Too bad, but it doesn't mean make is somehow a bad tool...it just doesn't fit all problems.

Given that make isn't working well in this case due to spaces, I would personally probably use something like find and sed in a bash script to just get all the files and convert them to pdf. (Obviously this won't work if your system doesn't have these tools though...)

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#246

Post by hzhou321 »

com2kid wrote: post #243
hzhou321 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile over in Windows land, all tools have been expected to deal with spaces in them for what is approaching 20 years. That is an excellent example that deserves a second look from a different aspect. ... it has trained a crop of computer users that are afraid of command lines and with an attitude of anything beneath the GUI interface is owned by and of someone else's problem. They are scared of computers more…

> it has trained a crop of computer users that are afraid of command lines and with an attitude of anything beneath the GUI interface is owned by and of someone else's problem. There is nothing beneath the Windows UI interface. The GUI is the primary subsystem of Windows, the command line is a separate subsystem. Windows has traditionally been built up around the Win32 API, which is GUI first. It is of course possibl…

> There is nothing beneath the Windows UI interface.

To clarify, beneath the GUI interface is the actual code that implements that interface.

> Something working so well that it becomes an appliance isn't a bad thing.

Not at all. I don't attempt to call or think my phone as an computer. Window's users, on the other hand, still call their PC computers. I guess that is ok if computers are appliances. It is just that there are still a big camp of people who use a computer as computer. That causes some confusions in the communication between.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#247

Post by ori_b »

lisper wrote: post #185
derefr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

On plan 9, you'd do something like:

     ctlfd = open("/mnt/sql/ctl", OREAD|OWRITE);
     write(fd, "your query");
     read(fd, resultpath);


     resultfd = open(resultpath, OREAD);
     read(fd, result);
     close(resultfd);
This is similar to the patterns used to open network connections or create new windows.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#248

Post by gdwatson »

reificator wrote: post #239
hzhou321 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Human beings who name things are going to use spaces. That spaces were used as delimiters for computers is somewhere between unfortunate and a colossal mistake. But to use that as evidence of why spaces should not be supported in filenames is putting the cart before the horse. The goal of software is not to perpetuate whatever mistakes have been made in the past. It's to solve problems for human beings. And human bei…

On the command line, using spaces to delimit words is also quite natural; that's why they get used as a delimiter:

    mv old-file new-file
Spaces separate the verb, the direct object, and the indirect object. Using commas or colons instead would painfully artificial.

So the question is whether you will favor naturalness on the command line or in the GUI. It's no surprise that a Unix build tool favors the command line.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#249

Post by hungerstrike »

dblotsky wrote: post #240

Thank you. It's nice to know that I'm not alone in this dark, dark world. It's so depressing when people use arguments like "it's old", "it uses tabs", and "it's hard to learn". As described by one Peter Miller, "Make is an expert system". If a tool is the most powerful, standard, and expressive among its peers, its age or the fact that it uses tabs should be inconsequential. If anything, the fact that it's decades o…

The tools are not the same on every platform. That’s reason enough for me to not use it with my JavaScript projects.

The bigger reason though is that it’s not very idiomatic for JavaScript projects to use Make. It sounds like the only reason that some people go out of their way to use it is because they actually don’t want to learn something.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#250

Post by JustSomeNobody »

to3m wrote: post #241
hzhou321 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about real world is that in real world, it is not context-free. There are real world situations -- such as selling a word processor to general public (especially) including clueless -- you need to deal with files with spaces, period. But there are real world situations -- such as Makefiles -- requires users to learn the tool, to be able to handle certain tricky situations themselves and excludes incompetents. An…

I'm bemused by this repeated insistence that supporting spaces in file names is somehow difficult.

The word was complicated, not difficult. It is not difficult to handle spaces, it is more complicated.
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