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You seem to imply that once you understand make, you won't dislike it anymore or don't want to see it replaced or will stop criticizing it. For one thing, the b

by stinos 9y ago

You seem to imply that once you understand make, you won't dislike it anymore or don't want to see it replaced or will stop criticizing it. For one thing, the better you understand a tool the more correct your critique on it can be. I learned quite a bit of make and msbuild and cmake (yeah it's not a true build system but that doesn't matter here) at practically the same time. I can't say I really really like any of those. I also don't truly hate them. Yet one thing is clear: I understand how they work and how they were intended to be used. But none of them are the perfect answer. No matter how well e.g. make works, that doesn't somehow magically make it's sometimes awkward 'let's cram as much meaning as possible into as little characters as possible like we're still programming on 75 character terminals' syntax good. Just like msbuild's overly verbose xml is no better. Though it still is more readable to me. So just like you understand make, you should try to understand why people build replacements. If you can't, you're just blind for the downsides of your favourite build tool.

Annatar 9y ago
You seem to imply that once you understand make, you won't dislike it anymore or don't want to see it replaced or will stop criticizing it. Criticising it?!? Make is an ingenious tool! It's a phenomenal tool, if one just looks at the flexibility of it, never mind all the super useful built in rules that it comes with out of the box! For one thing, the better you understand a tool the more correct your critique on it can be. Correct, but therein lies the rub: the author of the essay clearly does not command understanding of Make, and even worse, he believes he does. Worst of all, he is not alone: this Make hate pops up every so often here, one can clearly see who is learning build systems and who eventually hit Make (all build systems' roads lead to Make sooner or later) and just didn't get it. By my own experience, it's mostly Windows users turned GNU/Linux. I would be curious to learn whether I'm correct in the case of the author of the essay, really curious.

by stinos 9y ago

Annatar 9y ago

You seem to imply that once you understand make, you won't dislike it anymore or don't want to see it replaced or will stop criticizing it. Criticising it?!? Make is an ingenious tool! It's a phenomenal tool, if one just looks at the flexibility of it, never mind all the super useful built in rules that it comes with out of the box! For one thing, the better you understand a tool the more correct your critique on it can be. Correct, but therein lies the rub: the author of the essay clearly does not command understanding of Make, and even worse, he believes he does. Worst of all, he is not alone: this Make hate pops up every so often here, one can clearly see who is learning build systems and who eventually hit Make (all build systems' roads lead to Make sooner or later) and just didn't get it. By my own experience, it's mostly Windows users turned GNU/Linux. I would be curious to learn whether I'm correct in the case of the author of the essay, really curious.