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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

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Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#101

Post by kragen »

silver_silver wrote: post #81
huijzer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Small nuance: I think people often don’t know because they don’t have the time to figure it out. There are only so many battles you can fight during a day. For example if I’m a C++ programmer working on a ticket, how many layers of the stack should I know? For example, should I know h…

We can’t really call the field engineering if this is the standard. A fundamental understanding of what one’s code actually makes the machine do is necessary to write quality code regardless of how high up the abstraction stack it is

Steam engines predate the understanding of not just the crystalline structure of steel but even the basics of thermodynamics by quite a few decades.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#102

Post by kragen »

cudgy wrote: post #91
silver_silver wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can’t really call the field engineering if this is the standard. A fundamental understanding of what one’s code actually makes the machine do is necessary to write quality code regardless of how high up the abstraction stack it is

Sure if you are doing embedded programming in C. How does one do this in web development though where there are hundreds of dependencies that get updated monthly and still add functionality and keep their job?

Maybe switch to less frequently updated dependencies and rewrite the easy ones in-house?

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#103

Post by camgunz »

This is pretty thought provoking. I think the issue is "80% of the use of this complicated tool is for very simple ends". From there you get a lot of "I can't be bothered to learn git/make/sed/helm/jenkins, all I'm doing is X 15 minutes a year". My guess is SWEs hate ceilings, so we don't want to use tools that have them, even though they'd be far more fit for purpose. We also don't want to build tools with ceilings: why limit your potential userbase/market?

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#104

Post by kragen »

pantalaimon wrote: post #95
kragen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've always been mystified by the idea that writing a new Makefile is some kind of wizardly mystery. Make has its design flaws, for sure, but how hard is it really to write this? CFLAGS = -std=gnu99 -Wall all: foo clean: $(RM) foo *.o foo: foo_main.o foolib.o $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $^ -o $@ (Except with tabs, which HN doesn't allow.) I haven't tested what I just typed above, but I'm reasonably sure that if…

Auto-generated Makefiles that CMake and Autotools produce really leave a bad impression on how complex Makefiles need to be.

Yeah, I guess trying to read the output of gcc -O -S would make assembly language seem pretty overwhelming, too.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#105

Post by rmgk »

bboygravity wrote: post #18
donatj wrote: post #6

If I had a nickel for every time I have seen a Makefile straight up copied from other projects and modified to "work" while leaving completely unrelated unnecessary build steps and targets in place. It's a major pet peeve of mine.

How do you know what is and isn't related if nothing is documented? Trial and error? Well have fun with that :p

You find the first part in your stack that is documented (e.g., make is documented, even if your makefile is not) and use that documentation to understand the undocumented part. You then write down your findings for the next person.

If you don’t have enough time, write down whatever pieces you understood, and write down what parts “seem to work, but you don’t understand“ to help make progress towards better documentation.

If you put the documentation as comments into the file, this can make copy&pasting working examples into a reasonably solid process.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#106

Post by oweiler »

huijzer wrote: post #64
mianos wrote: post #29

I 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. Small nuance: I think people often don’t know because they don’t have the time to figure it out. There are only so many battles you can fight during a day. For example if I’m a C++ programmer working on a ticket, how many layers of the stack should I know? For example, should I know h…

That's why suggestions like RTFM! are stupid. I just don't have time to read every reference documentation of every tool I use.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#107

Post by mianos »

f1shy wrote: post #70
mianos wrote: post #29

I 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…

I would just change the percentages, but is about as true as it gets.

I’d be curious to hear your ratio. It really varies. In some small teams with talented people, there are hardly any “fake” developers. But in larger companies, they can make up a huge chunk.

Where I am now, it’s easily over 50%, and most of the real developers have already left.

PS: The fakes aren’t always juniors. Sometimes you have junior folks who are actually really good—they just haven’t had time yet to discover what they don’t know. It’s often absolutely clear that certain juniors will be very good just from a small contribution.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#108

Post by aragilar »

sandbach wrote: post #63
ruuda wrote: post #12

I think LaTeX is the poster child of this. Nobody writes a LaTeX preamble from scratch, you always copy your previous document and tweak it.

Don't do that! If you're always using the same preamble, you should turn it into a .sty file. Then the preamble of new documents is just \usepackage{myessay}

I did that, then I needed to tweak things so I added options, then I needed to use the package somewhere that needed to be self-contained, so I started copy-pasting ;). I've done similar things with makefiles, tox configs, linter settings (all of which started from an initial version I wrote from scratch).

I suspect the real reason this effect exists is because there's copy-pasting is the best way to solve the problem, due to a varying mix of: there being no way of managing the dependencies, needing to avoid (unmanaged) dependencies (i.e. vendoring is the same, only we have a tool managing it), the file (or its contents) needing to exist there specifically (e.g. the various CI locations) and no real agreement on what template/templating tool to use (and a template is just as likely to include useless junk). Copy-pasting is viewed as a one-time cost, and the thing copy-pasted isn't expected to change all that much.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#109

Post by silver_silver »

kragen wrote: post #101
silver_silver wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can’t really call the field engineering if this is the standard. A fundamental understanding of what one’s code actually makes the machine do is necessary to write quality code regardless of how high up the abstraction stack it is

Steam engines predate the understanding of not just the crystalline structure of steel but even the basics of thermodynamics by quite a few decades.

Yes and they’re far less efficient and require far more maintenance than an equivalent electric or even diesel engine, where equivalent power is even possible

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#110

Post by mianos »

adrian_b wrote: post #79
mianos wrote: post #29

I 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…

Actually it is trivial to write a very simple Makefile for a 10,000 file project, despite the fact that almost all Makefiles that I have ever seen in open-source projects are ridiculously complicated, far more complicated than a good Makefile would be. In my opinion, it is a mistake almost always when you see in a Makefile an individual rule for making a single file. Normally, there should be only generic building ru…

If everything in your tree is similar, yes. I agree that's going to be a very small Makefile.

While this is true, for much larger projects, that have lived for a long time, you will have many parts, all with slight differences. For example, over time the language flavour of the day comes and goes. Structure changes in new code. Often different subtrees are there for different platforms or environments.

The Linux kernel is a good, maybe extreme, but clear example. There are hundreds of Makefiles.

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