Is not this a very generic phenomenon? I would argue it applies broadly. For example budgeting, you usually start from last year's budget and tweak that, rather than start from scratch. Or when you write an application letter, or a ServiceNow ticket, or whatever. Now I regret that I have brought in ServiceNow in the discussion, it kills the good mood....
Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
41–50 of 347 posts
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#42I have observed the Makefile effect many times for LaTeX documents. Most researchers I worked with had a LaTeX file full of macros that they have been carrying from project to project for years. These were often inherited from more senior researchers, and were hammered into heavily-modified forks of article templates used in their field or thesis templates used at their institution.
This is a great example of an instance of this "Makefile effect" with a possible solution: use Markdown and Pandoc where possible. This won't work in every situation, but sometimes one can compose a basic Beamer presentation or LaTeX paper quickly using largely simple TeX and the same Markdown syntax you already know from GitHub and Reddit.
> use Markdown and Pandoc where possible.
That won’t solve any problem that LaTeX macros solve. Boilerplate in LaTeX has 2 purposes.
The first is to factor frequently-used complex notations. To do this in Markdown you’d need to bolt on a macro preprocessor on top of Markdown.
The second one is to fine-tune typography and layout details (tables are a big offender). This is something that simply cannot be done in Markdown. A table is a table and if you don’t like the style (which is most of the time inadequate) then there is no solution.
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#43I have made conscious effort in the past to never copy/paste the initial fleshing-out of a Makefile or a PHP class, or HTML boilerplate, or whatever. Like, for years I stuck to that. Then I stopped making that effort because there is no upside. Or rather, there is no downside to copy+paste+modify. It's faster and you save your brain power for things that actually matter.
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#44I see this effect in Java Maven pom.xml files. It's hard to get a straightforward answer on why each build step is needed, what each attribute means, what parts are optional or mandatory, etc. There seems to be a culture of copying these XML files and tweaking a few things without truly understanding what the whole file means. I briefly looked at Ant and Gradle, and their ecosystems don't look any better. The build c…
Java would really benefit from a fresh take on the build story. Maven is definitely a tool that suffers from this phenomenon.
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#45A better name for this might be the JCL effect, as even experienced mainframe sysprogs copypasta the JCL it takes to build their COBOL programs from a known-good example and then mutatis the mutandis, rather than attempt to build a mental model of how JCL works from the impenetrable documentation and write JCL de novo.
It's no big deal to me to write a small Makefile from scratch. My editor (Emacs) even knows to always use tabs when I hit TAB in a Makefile, removing the confusion of whether I inserted tabs (correct) or spaces (horribly incorrect) on the lines with the commands to build a particular target.
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#46I have an alternate theory: about 10% of developers can actually start something from scratch because they truly understand how things work (not that they always do it, but they could if needed). Another 40% can get the daily job done by copying and pasting code from local sources, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or an LLM—while kinda knowing what’s going on. That leaves 50% who don’t really know much beyond a few LeetCode p…
> That leaves 50% who don’t really know much beyond a few LeetCode puzzles and have no real grasp of what they’re copying and pasting. Who likely wouldn't have a job if it weren't for LLMs.
pretty sure we've made this complaint about a subset of developers since way before chatgpt and the like.
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#47I think Makefile is maybe the wrong analogy - the problem with most people and makefiles is they write so few of them, the general idea of what make does is at hand, but the muscle memory of how to do it from scratch is not. But, point taken - I've seen so much code copy-pasta'd from the web, there will be like a bunch of dead stuff in it that's actually not used. A good practice here is to keep deleting stuff until…
This is exactly the problem I face with many tools, Makefiles, KVM setups, docker configurations, CI/CD pipelines. My solution so far has been to create a separate repository with all my notes, shell script example programs etc, for these tool, libraries or frameworks. Every time I have to use these tools, I refer to my notes to refresh my memory, and if I learn something new in the process, I update the notes. I can…
What if your client comes back?
On a more practical note, what structure, formats and tools do you use that enable you to feed it to an LLM?
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#48Okey but to me, copying - pasting working code (even with sone extra unused bits) really looks no more different than inheriting a library - provided base class, and then extending it to one's needs.
That's literally the basis of all software. There is no need to invent "a Makefile effect/syndrome"
Yes that's an indication that a code sharing mechanism is needed but not implemented. Copying pasting solves that. You don't expect people to rewrite http client for every project which interacts with APIs, so you?
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#49This is “Copy-Pasta Driven Development” [0] and it’s not even related to makefiles. It’s related to the entire industry copying code from here to there without even knowing what they are copying.
TBH I think copilot has made this even worse, as we are blindly accepting chucks of code into our code bases.
[0] https://andrew.grahamyooll.com/blog/copy-pasta-driven-develo...
Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
#50We use Cargo Cult to refer to this phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming