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The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

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Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#231

Post by coldtea »

hzhou321 wrote: post #227
com2kid wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And there are solutions. One solution, from those who don't code, seems to demand ("developers", paid or not) that every tool that deal with files should handle this additional complexity, regardless of their context and what they think. Users expect computers to work in a non-surprising ways. It isn't natural to use dashes or underscore in file names. Training users to be afraid of spaces is just teaching them one…

> Meanwhile over in Windows land, all tools have been expected to deal with spaces in them for what is approaching 20 years. That is an excellent example that deserves a second look from a different aspect. ... it has trained a crop of computer users that are afraid of command lines and with an attitude of anything beneath the GUI interface is owned by and of someone else's problem. They are scared of computers more…

Which is not a problem. The command line was only one, historical UI. Not the be-all end-all of UIs, and there's no reason it should be of any real interest to modern desktop users (non devs).

And I cut my teeth as a developer on DOS, Sun OS (pre-Solaris), and HP-UX, and early Linux back in the day.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#232

Post by theothershoe »

jlg23 wrote: post #133

The author forgot some great features of make: * Parallel execution of build rules comes for free in a lot of implementations. This is really noticeable when you do heavy asset pre-processing. * Cleanly written build rules are re-usable across projects as long as those projects have the same structure (directory layout). * Cleanly written build rules provide incremental compilation/assembly for free: You express inte…

Thank you for these points! I think that parallel execution is especially appealing. I edited the article to mention that.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#233

Post by scbrg »

zer00eyz wrote: post #210
hzhou321 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one? While you are allowing spaces, you probabaly are allowing all possible code points or maybe even a null byte? Thinking about it gives me headaches. I hate hearing people using 21st century or modern as…

> At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile. I don't understand why one would think that make would be a good tool for this... > Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, a…

> I don't understand why one would think that make would be a good tool for this...

Why not? To me, it sounds like a perfect use of Make. You have a number of files that should be processed somehow (presumably by invoking a certain tool for each and every file) and produce another set of files.

Whether it's C-files to compiled binaries, or some source files to PDF:s, make seems very well suited for the job. Except yeah, perhaps, spaces.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#234

Post by LukeShu »

peterwwillis wrote: post #121
sebcat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It actually doesn't know anything at all about how to build C, C++, or any other kind of code. I guess it depends on how you define "know", but there are implicit rules. $ cat foo.c #include int main() { printf("Hello\n"); return 0; } $ cat Makefile foo: foo.c $ make cc -O2 -pipe foo.c -o foo $ ./foo Hello

Yeah. There is a metric crap-ton of the design of Make that is solely for the purpose of compiling and linking and document processing. That's actually part of what makes it annoying to use it for projects other than C or C++, when you don't need to compile or transform or depend on different formats.

> There is a metric crap-ton of the design of Make that is solely for the purpose of compiling and linking and document processing.

Not really. The bit being pointed out here certainly isn't. It's not any special design going on, it's just a built-in library of rules and variables for C/C++/Pascal/Fortran/Modula-2/Assembler/TeX. These rules are no different than if you had typed them in to the Makefile yourself. And if you don't like them, you can say --no-builtin-rules --no-builtin-variables.

The only actual bit of C-specific design I can think of is .LIBPATTERNS library searching.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#235

Post by DanHulton »

A tiny improvement that could be added - instead of locating Babel by adding your project's `node_modules/.bin` to your path or directly linking to it, you can always write:

`npx babel`

This will use any installed version of babel in your node_modules, or, if not installed, will temporarily install it for the duration of the command.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#236

Post by scbrg »

Zofren wrote: post #228
xamuel wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution: create the pdfs with spaces replaced by underscores. Then as the very last command in the relevant makefile section, insert a bash command to replace those underscores with spaces.

What if the filename is a mixture of underscores and spaces?

Escaping an escape character is not a new problem in programming. There are solutions :-)

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#237

Post by xamuel »

Zofren wrote: post #228
xamuel wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution: create the pdfs with spaces replaced by underscores. Then as the very last command in the relevant makefile section, insert a bash command to replace those underscores with spaces.

What if the filename is a mixture of underscores and spaces?

"Premature generalization is the root of all evil."

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#238

Post by Chlorus »

coldtea wrote: post #231
hzhou321 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile over in Windows land, all tools have been expected to deal with spaces in them for what is approaching 20 years. That is an excellent example that deserves a second look from a different aspect. ... it has trained a crop of computer users that are afraid of command lines and with an attitude of anything beneath the GUI interface is owned by and of someone else's problem. They are scared of computers more…

Which is not a problem. The command line was only one, historical UI. Not the be-all end-all of UIs, and there's no reason it should be of any real interest to modern desktop users (non devs). And I cut my teeth as a developer on DOS, Sun OS (pre-Solaris), and HP-UX, and early Linux back in the day.

Almost every CLI program I've ever used in Windows has no problem with spaces in filenames, so I don't exactly why he's fixated on the GUI... But I had forgotten, computers aren't useful as tools to accomplish work, but as mechanisms to assuage intellectual inferiority complexes. He should advocate for punch cards again, since that would certainly stop morons from using computers.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#239

Post by reificator »

hzhou321 wrote: post #198
neonscribe wrote: post #178

I used make heavily in the 80s and 90s, but haven't much since then. Recently I started a project that had source files getting processed into PDF files, for use by humans. Since this is the 21st century, those files have spaces in their names. At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile. A little searching reveals that the consensus on usi…

Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one? While you are allowing spaces, you probabaly are allowing all possible code points or maybe even a null byte? Thinking about it gives me headaches. I hate hearing people using 21st century or modern as…

Human beings who name things are going to use spaces. That spaces were used as delimiters for computers is somewhere between unfortunate and a colossal mistake.

But to use that as evidence of why spaces should not be supported in filenames is putting the cart before the horse. The goal of software is not to perpetuate whatever mistakes have been made in the past. It's to solve problems for human beings.

And human beings have been using spaces to delimit words since long before computers existed.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#240

Post by dblotsky »

Thank you. It's nice to know that I'm not alone in this dark, dark world.

It's so depressing when people use arguments like "it's old", "it uses tabs", and "it's hard to learn". As described by one Peter Miller, "Make is an expert system". If a tool is the most powerful, standard, and expressive among its peers, its age or the fact that it uses tabs should be inconsequential.

If anything, the fact that it's decades old and used in every major software project is a testament to its effectiveness, not a drawback.

And if "learning Make" is a barrier, that to me is a sign that someone cares more about complaining than about their project. The same way people learn Git when it's clear that it's the best tool, people learn Make. It really isn't that hard. Even the basics are enough to reap huge benefits immediately.

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