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>Makefiles are unreasonably effective. I'm torn, I like Makefiles, but I've seen a lot of unreadable Makefiles with a lot of interpolation and ugly escaping, i
by theden 4y ago
>Makefiles are unreasonably effective.
I'm torn, I like Makefiles, but I've seen a lot of unreadable Makefiles with a lot of interpolation and ugly escaping, including cases where what should have been a proper shellscript (his point 25) crammed in a Makefile. I think Makefiles should be dead simple to see what a target does
Overall I agree, but IMO people ought to drop the 10k hours Gladwell term, to be frank it's bullshit.
- silverwind 4y agoEvery tool can be misused and Make has a ton of common pitfalls for novices to fall into. Properly written Makefiles do feel like magic (in a good way) when they run.
- hiepph 4y agoMakefile is like Bash. It's effective, ubiquitous and pleasant to work with simple logic. In my case, if I need to scale to a more complicated problem, I would use Rakefile and Ruby (in replace of Makefile and Bash).
- spacetime_cmplx 4y agoAfter using https://github.com/casey/just https://github.com/casey/just in a medium sized project, I wholly recommend anyone even slightly frustrated with Makefiles to switch to this. C++ : C :: Just : Make More sensible defaults, fewer footguns, just as expressive (pardon the pun), but still nearly the same syntax and paradigms so you don't have to learn a completely new scripting language. The biggest downside, however, is that it's not installed by default on many systems and it's not in the official repos of some major distros. If that's a dealbreaker, stick with Make.