101–110 of 195 posts
Seriously now I love Makefiles and use them extensively (nothing like make serve and make deploy to simplify my day), but there is a limit where being too opinionated (rather than just simple, easy to understand conventions) just ruins the tool and adds too much cognitive overhead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I felt the opposite, I (among many) was winging my makefiles due to unfinished learning. I always appreciate high precision posts like these (even if some of the points are above the top).
It's high precision of a flawed view (in my opinion, of course) that should only be taken for what they are, an opinion. For any readers that want to learn make, look at the makefiles of big projects and see how they set things up. There's a huge difference of one person's opinions vs. a working system for a real world project.
Build systems are hard so I’m not gonna point fingers too hard. But reading/writing makefiles is one of my least favorite parts of the job.
This seems like a lot of work to not just consider ninja, meson, CMake, etc. I fully understand that the simplicity and portability of Make is alluring, but if you are actually using it to build C software it is a catastrophically poor choice and you can spend a ton of time and effort trying to come close to what you can get out of the box on a modern build system. If the tradeoff was that Make was easier to use and…
Also, your CMake generates Makefiles, so...
CMake and meson/ninja, though, seem to be pretty much tuned to compiling C-shaped things, although I’d like to see them (ab)used for other things.
The HN and the blogosphere generally are replete with unconvincing "you're doing it wrong" posts. This is one. I use make (and have used it off and on for a long long time: since the late 80s). I don't do any of these things. If the author is going to make a convincing case his way is "right" and other ways are "wrong", it's incumbent upon him to clearly state what failures I will avoid. Then I can evaluate how often…
The author makes several convincing arguments and specifically lays out what failure modes are avoided for each recommendation. Honestly the title is completely out of step with the tone of the argument, which is a critique I can support.
It’s an opinionated blog post about relatively minor Makefile conventions with a clickbait title, which doesn’t look obviously self-submitted.
And yet the thread is #1 and has 96 comments, of which like 92 are trashing the poor guy.
Surely there is someone more worthy of an HN gang-tackle than this? It can’t be that slow of a news day.
The HN and the blogosphere generally are replete with unconvincing "you're doing it wrong" posts. This is one. I use make (and have used it off and on for a long long time: since the late 80s). I don't do any of these things. If the author is going to make a convincing case his way is "right" and other ways are "wrong", it's incumbent upon him to clearly state what failures I will avoid. Then I can evaluate how often…
I feel the same way. I strongly believe that choice of language makes a huge difference in your material’s reception. Any time I am told that something I’m doing is wrong by an article, an inanimate piece of text that clearly has no cognition thus no idea what I’m doing or not doing, I think that the person who wrote it, is, in fact, communicating wrong. I was on the fence about posting this reply; after all the guid…
Not with me, unless you're talking about the difference between clear and unclear language.
I'm not bothered by language that some people seem to class as patronizing or like you know everything or whatever. When somebody is explaining something to me, I don't want them to explain it to me like I know it already. I want them to explain it to me like someone I've hired to explain things to me i.e. like they're the expert and I'm not.
If I think I know everything about make, there's no reason for me to have clicked on this other than an urge to seek out things that confirm my sense of self-worth, or to get upset about things that threaten it.
I hate developers like this. This is the attitude of every weirdo developer I've had to work with who thought they were brilliant instead of just using the stupid tool as it was intended.
"Don't use tabs" just seems wrong. "Use a recent bash" seems like a matter of preference. "Make is all about files (paraphrasing)" seems a little obvious hopefully, but definitely the way Make is intended to be used. "Magic variables" eh... I dunno, I guess sometimes they can get obscure but it isn't super hard to look this sort of thing up. The omission of % seems weird.
Unfortunately it's not merely a preference; old Bash versions (in particular the one that shipped on macOS for a long time) have had at least one nasty behavior (I think multiple, but I recall at least definitely one) that have been fixed since then, but which cause grief in Makefiles. I don't recall what it was or have a link handy, but if anybody knows, please leave it here; it's a well-known issue.