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Linux Fu: The Great Power of Make

25 points by axiomdata316 8y ago

haolez 8y ago
Makefiles really surprised me when I took some time to really learn how to write them. It’s a very elegant language that feels more like a spreadsheet than normal coding. Don’t judge me, but I think that the Makefile language is one of those that will make you a better programmer overall after learning it. Give it a try!
- Roboprog 8y ago
  I often miss “make”. I suspect if there were no such thing as MS WIndows, we would all (still) be using make, rather than each language having a handful of competing build tools. Code generation used to be trivial, as well, rather than having to write “plugins” in XML build tool N.
beardicus 8y ago
Semi-related, I love this article by Mike Bostock about using Make to capture some design/data workflows: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/ https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/ I fiddled with this idea and made a Makefile that downloads a book from the Internet Archive, extracts all the illustrations and tweaks them with ImageMagick: https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips/blob/master/Makefile https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips/blob/master/Mak... This isn't the smartest Makefile... I've learned a bit since. Regardless, I find it really fun to smoosh a process into a dependency graph frame-of-mind. Does anybody else have any examples of "non-traditional" uses of Make? Anything beyond compiling code or using it as a straightforward task runner?
RickJWagner 8y ago
Hacker News paydirt!
RickJWagner 8y ago
If only Maven were replaced with Make (in the Java world).
aequitas 8y ago
A former college introduced me to make as alternative for custom build scripting (bash) I wrote for some Python projects. I always assumed it could only be used for C style projects where you had compile steps and such, but it's so much more and I haven't looked back since. Make is almost as ubiquitous as shell script on any working environment and the mix of its own declarative syntax and 'regular' imperative script allows almost any task to be modelled.

25 points by axiomdata316 8y ago

Makefiles really surprised me when I took some time to really learn how to write them. It’s a very elegant language that feels more like a spreadsheet than normal coding. Don’t judge me, but I think that the Makefile language is one of those that will make you a better programmer overall after learning it. Give it a try!

Roboprog 8y ago
I often miss “make”. I suspect if there were no such thing as MS WIndows, we would all (still) be using make, rather than each language having a handful of competing build tools. Code generation used to be trivial, as well, rather than having to write “plugins” in XML build tool N.

beardicus 8y ago

Semi-related, I love this article by Mike Bostock about using Make to capture some design/data workflows: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/ https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/ I fiddled with this idea and made a Makefile that downloads a book from the Internet Archive, extracts all the illustrations and tweaks them with ImageMagick: https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips/blob/master/Makefile https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips/blob/master/Mak... This isn't the smartest Makefile... I've learned a bit since. Regardless, I find it really fun to smoosh a process into a dependency graph frame-of-mind. Does anybody else have any examples of "non-traditional" uses of Make? Anything beyond compiling code or using it as a straightforward task runner?

RickJWagner 8y ago

Hacker News paydirt!

RickJWagner 8y ago

If only Maven were replaced with Make (in the Java world).

aequitas 8y ago

A former college introduced me to make as alternative for custom build scripting (bash) I wrote for some Python projects. I always assumed it could only be used for C style projects where you had compile steps and such, but it's so much more and I haven't looked back since. Make is almost as ubiquitous as shell script on any working environment and the mix of its own declarative syntax and 'regular' imperative script allows almost any task to be modelled.