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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

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Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#331

Post by znpy »

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…

> They can be a bad choice for a 10,000-file monster

Whether they are a bad choice really depends on what are the alternatives though

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#332

Post by davidguetta »

uludag wrote: post #153
davidguetta wrote: post #117

Is it not a problem which is basically COMPLETELY SOLVED by LLMs ? The reason this happens is because Makefiles (or CI/CD pipelines / linters config, bash scripts) are more or less "complete language" on their own, that are not worth learning when you can do ... exactly what the author says (copy/pasting/modifying until it works) 99% of the time. But LLMs in general know the language so if you ask "write a minimal Ma…

Completely solved? I'd say exacerbated beyond recognition. We have tools to let us get by so much farther without understanding anything, so it probably becomes less of a problem in more cases. But it basically guarantees that all but the most curious will not understand how the system actually works. Everything becomes magical copy/pasting from the most advanced information retrieval system with LLMs.

But LLMs is literally a "person in the room" that actually knows how it works.

The simplification and explanation abilities of chatGPT are off the charts in precisely these cases. I honestly don't understand why I'm being downvoted.

You wanted a simpler make file before ? go spend 2 days learning the make syntax

You want a simpler make file now ? just ask for it as long as as the explanation with it of all the concepts to ChatGPT and you'll get it

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#333

Post by semi-extrinsic »

upbeat_general wrote: post #254
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think you can just run your CI/CD on a single server without networking or virtualization, I have some very large, parallelized testing suites to show you. Nowadays you can get a single server with 256 cores and several terabytes of memory. I would be interested to learn what kind of testing suites have actual needs beyond that. Without virtualization though is definitely no problem. The whole docker/k8s/wha…

For a start, any suite that takes >X hours on a single node, especially compounded if you have a large team of developers. > At least as long as you're running your own code on your own hardware Assuming you keep a consistent env/OS across all nodes you will want to run said code. Which can be difficult, even just between two users on a single node. Not to mention the fact that a lot of (most?) code needs to (A) inte…

> For a start, any suite that takes >X hours on a single node, especially compounded if you have a large team of developers.

If your testing suite takes several hours to run on a 256 core server, and this is something you want to run on every commit by every dev, then you have a problem with your testing suite. Running it on k8s is just slapping a bandaid on it.

> Assuming you keep a consistent env/OS across all nodes you will want to run said code. Which can be difficult, even just between two users on a single node.

> Not to mention the fact that a lot of (most?) code needs to (A) interoperate with other people's code and (B) at least sometimes run on other hardware.

Yes, this is the problem that has been solved since the 90s by environment modules. This is how clusters and supercomputers work. There is no virtualization, just tcl and shell scripts.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#334

Post by retros3x »

bluGill wrote: post #279
kragen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I write most things in Python or JavaScript because it's much more practical.

Both have strong limits for writing complex code. Typescript is one attempt of an answer because bad as javascript is for large programs the web forces it. I prefer a million lines of c++ to 100k lines of python - but if 5k lines of python sill do them c++ is way too much overhead. (rust likely plays better than c++ for large problems from scratch but most large probles have existing answers and throwing something el…

Many devs are never even coming into challenging projects like that. For a large part of the dev community its just simple webapps for most of their professional life.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#335

Post by retros3x »

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

The problem is that software is much more forgiving than real life engineering project. You can't build a skyscraper with duct tape. With software, especially the simple webapps most devs work on, you don't NEED good engineering skills to get it running. It will suck of course, but it will not fall apart immediately. So of course most "engineers" will go the path of least resistance and never leave the higher abstractions to dive deep in concrete fundamentals.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#336

Post by rednafi »

stefr- wrote: post #319
rednafi wrote: post #152

This also happens with tools you have to use but don’t get much payoff from—like internal tooling. At work, we have a shitty in-house feature flag service. It breaks all the time and is super finicky. Learning it properly doesn’t really help me, so I mostly copy and paste my way through it. Another example is jq. I use it occasionally, and ChatGPT handles the syntax pretty well. For me, learning it properly just isn’…

> Another example is jq. I use it occasionally, and ChatGPT handles the syntax pretty well. For me, learning it properly just isn’t worth the time or effort. This resonates with me, I was in exactly the same position when I needed to do something with `kubectl` JSON output - just ask ChatGPT because I couldn't be bothered to learn the unintuitive syntax. Interestingly I _can_ blame the tool, because I started using N…

Nushell is awesome. Too bad the incompatibilities are still a bit too much for me to use it as a daily driver.

It’s easy to blame the tool, but sometimes the problem space is inherently complex. With limited time, building the right abstraction is an immensely difficult job. LLMs fixed this issue for me, and I’ve stopped complaining about unintuitive but ubiquitous tools.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#337

Post by dfawcus »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #330
dfawcus wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C (K&R) : 1972 => 53 years ago C++ : 1985 => 40 years ago D : 2001 => 23 years ago Also, https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html So D is 30 years younger than C, so I'd disagree with "isn't that much younger". D was really a reaction to C++, not C, so it is with C++ that it should be compared. The C like subset of D (BetterC) is much more recent.

I was thinking more about Ansi C. But fair enough. I hope the core point that these are all still Languages old enough to drink rings through.

Except ANSI did very little in terms of changing/enhancing the language. It stayed largely as it had been since Nov '78:

Nov 78 Memo: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cchanges.pdf

About all that happened with ANSI C was that prototypes were created (the major addition), type promotion rules were altered, plus 'const' and 'volatile' were added. ANSI also added 'void *'.

I've a vague recall about 'void' existing in unix C compilers before that, having read a version of the above memo in a unix manual ('papers' section) and it mentioning 'void'.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#338

Post by mrcsd »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #270
mrcsd wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disrespect is part of progress, respectful humans are liable to blindness of flaws. Just as part of youthful creativity is disregard for what has come before.

I can't agree with that take. Criticism is a part of progress. You can be a critic but still be respectful. Disrespect is simply to belittle and look down upon. I don't see many situations where such an attitude leads to progress.

If all disrespecting is to belittle and look down upon, then fair enough, I agree with you. What I meant, in perhaps an ill-phrased manner, was that overemphasised respect can often lead to stasis, where people might not want to change in case they are seen as disrespectful. Hence my use of disrespect, in that it is a relative judgement, and which can and has been used to discourage creative difference or just difference in general.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#339

Post by cle »

sgarland wrote: post #170
cle wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, there are many cases where I copy-paste stuff I've written in the past b/c some tool is a pain-in-the-ass and I can't afford the mental context switch. I usually do understand what's happening under the hood, but it's still cognitively heavy to switch into that "mode" so I avoid it when possible. Tools that fall into this category are usually ops-y things with enormous complexity but are not "core" to the pro…

It’s always hoped (but rarely shown to be true) that by making templates, teams will put thought into their K8s deployments etc. instead of just copy/pasting. Alas, no – even when the only things the devs have to do is add resource requests and limits, those are invariably copy/pasted. If the app gets OOMkilled, they bump up memory limit until it doesn’t. If it’s never OOMkilled, it’s probably never touched, even if…

I do know how to profile my code, and I'll also continue to bias towards not doing it now. Even if it could mean more pain later.

I think part of the problem is that the pain it causes is quite visceral, but the opportunity cost is pretty abstract, so it's a lot easier to just focus on the pain and forget about what you're gaining.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#340

Post by kragen »

retros3x wrote: post #334
bluGill wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both have strong limits for writing complex code. Typescript is one attempt of an answer because bad as javascript is for large programs the web forces it. I prefer a million lines of c++ to 100k lines of python - but if 5k lines of python sill do them c++ is way too much overhead. (rust likely plays better than c++ for large problems from scratch but most large probles have existing answers and throwing something el…

Many devs are never even coming into challenging projects like that. For a large part of the dev community its just simple webapps for most of their professional life.

That was never a good strategy. Even before GPT-4 and Claude, those folks were losing their jobs to Wordpress, Google Sheets, Wix, SquareSpace, etc.
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