Make for hipsters

Here's a more in-depth and easy to read guide for beginners: http://www.computerhope.com/unix/umake.htm

If you want to see some interesting/convoluted Makefiles, get a very complex, large piece of software (something from Gnome, possibly) and use autoconf & automake to generate the Makefiles, then pour through them to see how they tick.

A more precise title would have been 'Make 101'. I also wouldn't have read an article by that title, although (not knowing any make) I'm glad that I did read this one.

I don't see what this has to do with hipsters. The fonts are not very cool.

This introduction neglects to mention that Makefile rules are primarily rules to derive files (usually from other files). Make will not re-run a rule when the target (file) generated by the rule is already up to date.

From this perspective, a well structured Makefile can be thought of as a pipeline/graph of functions, that derive values (files) from previously known values (files).

Expressing a build process in this kind of way makes it possible to support incremental / distributed build in a fairly natural / obvious way.

It is less obvious how to support incremental / distributed builds for the more general kind of imperative build script that does a bunch of side effects (e.g. the style of build script you'd get using something like ant).

Do so many people who go on this site not know how to make makefiles? Also why is it for hipsters? Or is the article for hipsters? Why does the author call his own published notes factually inaccurate? Why is it hacky to use a makefile? Is this all a big ruse?