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Having hurdles to jump over is perhaps a good thing? After all Torvalds built git to have a hierarchy of trust in the development of Linux. If someone can't un

Having hurdles to jump over is perhaps a good thing? After all Torvalds built git to have a hierarchy of trust in the development of Linux. If someone can't understand how to use make perhaps they shouldn't be fiddling with C.

dagmx 3y ago
Gatekeeping the entry to learn something is never good. There’s a big difference in developing trust to contribute to a project and developing knowledge to start with a new language. And I’ve worked with tons and tons of very amazing developers who aren’t comfortable with Make or even git because their careers have been with Visual Studio and other VCS. Therefore I don’t think it’s an adequate judge of skill.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  I'm pretty glad they gatekeep pilots and surgeons and all kinds of other occupations. Reading a manual, or failing to, is not gatekeeping. I learned how to write a Makefile in a few minutes, for free, with no one telling me I wasn't allowed to. There is no "gatekeeping" argument here, just whingy babies that no one should waste 10 seconds caring about.
  - dagmx 3y ago
    FWIW, both piloting and surgery have easy on ramps in guided settings, often with simulations. So even as a strawman analogies, they’re bad ones. Nevermind that you ignored the part where I delineated between learning and using it in important projects. I’m not even going to address the rest of your comment which is frankly a depressing outlook on life.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      So, the 'easy on ramp guided path' to being allowed to pilot a plane or practice medecine, is as easy or even in the same universe with writing a makefile? Do you hear yourself? Talk about invalid arguments holy shit! The easy on ramp was it was totally free and permissionless to learn how to write a Makefile, or read a bunch of existing ones, or countless howtos, and that a basic makefile is basic and you don't need to figure out the arcane bits until you want to, and at no point ever do you need a license no matter how easy or guided the path. You can be a poor 10 year old in a 3rd world country and write a Makefile. No gates kept. It's a depressing outlook on life to see something as simple a useful as make as some kind of problem where the supposedly superior answer is something ridiculous like python. The fact that anyone even for one second thinks these are reasonable thoughts is what is truly depressing.
      - dagmx 3y ago
        Is anger and derision your default state of discourse? Both your responses so far have been just completely over the top in both regards. But putting that aside, you don’t think Make has a ton of footguns for someone starting out? Spaces vs tabs for different bits because of decades of legacy? Oh but most editors default to tabs as spaces and suddenly no matter what you do, following tutorials will still fail. Or you try and mess around with an existing open source project to learn from it. You want to list the targets? Oh wait, there’s no standard way to examine the makefile without understanding Make first. If people consider Make easy to learn, imho they haven’t really reflected on how much more streamlined the rest of the software engineering ecosystem is, and how it benefits everyone from new programmers to experienced devs. I’m not the one saying it should be Python, I’m just saying Make is not a good solution in this day and age, when so many other ecosystems have shown they can have better on-boarding experiences. Anyway I won’t respond further. Feel free to rage reply as you want.
        Towaway69 3y ago
        Would anyone allow people without a drivers license onto the streets in a car? Is that gatekeeping or learning the rules of how a societal form of cooperation is practiced? Now whether learning how make works is the same as driving a car is left to the reader to decide. Either way make is also a societal form of cooperation with its rules and traditions. Where does gatekeeping start and where does societal norms and cooperation begin?
        ModernMech 3y ago
        Honestly, I’m closer to ditching C as the language for my systems course and moving to Rust entirely. It’s much easier than trying to rationalize the state of affairs through this gatekeeping in the name of safety lens. I thought we all decided that norms and just imploring coders to hold the tools the right way isn’t scalable. I thought the industry had moved to safety through tooling, not safety through peer pressure and hoop jumping. I mean, if we’re talking about cortical systems and safety, why is anyone using C at all?
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    Whingy babies, freshmen students… tomato tomato. Problem is if you care about the future, someone has to help the whingy babies become competent adults. Not everyone is a polymath autodidact that can absorb everything about computers like the HN crowd. Some rockstars start as whingy babies. If you don’t help them at that crucial time, the stay whingy babies, or worse, go on to become project managers. You don’t want the whingy babies managing your project.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      And yet there are actually whingy babies and, and no not all developers were once a whingy baby, in fact only the shit end of the bell curve ever were. Most people I even know at all never were, because it's not an automatic part of merely being new. There is no value in catering to them, since that generally requires blunt rather than sharp tools, and everyone else requires sharp tools to get actual work done. They can play with their toys, but they are toys thoight up by people who care about the wrong things. Anyone else should ignore and disregard them and their ignorant ideas. Make is probably not the final evolution of a build sysyem for eternity, merely the arguments given for python of all the ridiculous possibilities, have all been garbage so far. Now if a proposition included some sort of canonical flavor of python (or whatever language) that can be counted on to: - exist on any system, and "any system" does not mean "any linux intall from today forward" - could at least be added to any system if not already, ie, plain c source that compiles even on obscure old systems, or built out of something else equally ubiquitous like shell or awk. - single simple binary - all features included (no libraries of plugins and modules) - spec advances only slowly and thoughtufully and without breaking compatibility Make already exists, meets all of these points, and provides the means to express complex jobs or simple jobs without any special built-in magic support for any one language or framework of the month, especially not at the expense of any others. Although, even a mythical "canonical python subset" would be a strange thing to propose with it's meaninful whitespace, when one of the main complaints about make is the tabs.
  - raydev 3y ago
    Pilots and surgeons are following rules to avoid killing people. Make wasn't designed with any of that in mind. It was just one or a few people deciding the easiest path to code, or a style that they preferred. It turns out most people don't find their decisions to be intuitive or explicable even decades later.
- amno 3y ago
  How is it different to learn Make from any other building tool like Gradle, Scons, Cmake, you name it? Actually, basic is very simple, since the syntax is pretty much like the shell, or I mean, it is more or less shell scripts on steroids.

dagmx 3y ago

Gatekeeping the entry to learn something is never good. There’s a big difference in developing trust to contribute to a project and developing knowledge to start with a new language. And I’ve worked with tons and tons of very amazing developers who aren’t comfortable with Make or even git because their careers have been with Visual Studio and other VCS. Therefore I don’t think it’s an adequate judge of skill.

Brian_K_White 3y ago
I'm pretty glad they gatekeep pilots and surgeons and all kinds of other occupations. Reading a manual, or failing to, is not gatekeeping. I learned how to write a Makefile in a few minutes, for free, with no one telling me I wasn't allowed to. There is no "gatekeeping" argument here, just whingy babies that no one should waste 10 seconds caring about.
- dagmx 3y ago
  FWIW, both piloting and surgery have easy on ramps in guided settings, often with simulations. So even as a strawman analogies, they’re bad ones. Nevermind that you ignored the part where I delineated between learning and using it in important projects. I’m not even going to address the rest of your comment which is frankly a depressing outlook on life.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    So, the 'easy on ramp guided path' to being allowed to pilot a plane or practice medecine, is as easy or even in the same universe with writing a makefile? Do you hear yourself? Talk about invalid arguments holy shit! The easy on ramp was it was totally free and permissionless to learn how to write a Makefile, or read a bunch of existing ones, or countless howtos, and that a basic makefile is basic and you don't need to figure out the arcane bits until you want to, and at no point ever do you need a license no matter how easy or guided the path. You can be a poor 10 year old in a 3rd world country and write a Makefile. No gates kept. It's a depressing outlook on life to see something as simple a useful as make as some kind of problem where the supposedly superior answer is something ridiculous like python. The fact that anyone even for one second thinks these are reasonable thoughts is what is truly depressing.
    - dagmx 3y ago
      Is anger and derision your default state of discourse? Both your responses so far have been just completely over the top in both regards. But putting that aside, you don’t think Make has a ton of footguns for someone starting out? Spaces vs tabs for different bits because of decades of legacy? Oh but most editors default to tabs as spaces and suddenly no matter what you do, following tutorials will still fail. Or you try and mess around with an existing open source project to learn from it. You want to list the targets? Oh wait, there’s no standard way to examine the makefile without understanding Make first. If people consider Make easy to learn, imho they haven’t really reflected on how much more streamlined the rest of the software engineering ecosystem is, and how it benefits everyone from new programmers to experienced devs. I’m not the one saying it should be Python, I’m just saying Make is not a good solution in this day and age, when so many other ecosystems have shown they can have better on-boarding experiences. Anyway I won’t respond further. Feel free to rage reply as you want.
      - Towaway69 3y ago
        Would anyone allow people without a drivers license onto the streets in a car? Is that gatekeeping or learning the rules of how a societal form of cooperation is practiced? Now whether learning how make works is the same as driving a car is left to the reader to decide. Either way make is also a societal form of cooperation with its rules and traditions. Where does gatekeeping start and where does societal norms and cooperation begin?
        ModernMech 3y ago
        Honestly, I’m closer to ditching C as the language for my systems course and moving to Rust entirely. It’s much easier than trying to rationalize the state of affairs through this gatekeeping in the name of safety lens. I thought we all decided that norms and just imploring coders to hold the tools the right way isn’t scalable. I thought the industry had moved to safety through tooling, not safety through peer pressure and hoop jumping. I mean, if we’re talking about cortical systems and safety, why is anyone using C at all?
- ModernMech 3y ago
  Whingy babies, freshmen students… tomato tomato. Problem is if you care about the future, someone has to help the whingy babies become competent adults. Not everyone is a polymath autodidact that can absorb everything about computers like the HN crowd. Some rockstars start as whingy babies. If you don’t help them at that crucial time, the stay whingy babies, or worse, go on to become project managers. You don’t want the whingy babies managing your project.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    And yet there are actually whingy babies and, and no not all developers were once a whingy baby, in fact only the shit end of the bell curve ever were. Most people I even know at all never were, because it's not an automatic part of merely being new. There is no value in catering to them, since that generally requires blunt rather than sharp tools, and everyone else requires sharp tools to get actual work done. They can play with their toys, but they are toys thoight up by people who care about the wrong things. Anyone else should ignore and disregard them and their ignorant ideas. Make is probably not the final evolution of a build sysyem for eternity, merely the arguments given for python of all the ridiculous possibilities, have all been garbage so far. Now if a proposition included some sort of canonical flavor of python (or whatever language) that can be counted on to: - exist on any system, and "any system" does not mean "any linux intall from today forward" - could at least be added to any system if not already, ie, plain c source that compiles even on obscure old systems, or built out of something else equally ubiquitous like shell or awk. - single simple binary - all features included (no libraries of plugins and modules) - spec advances only slowly and thoughtufully and without breaking compatibility Make already exists, meets all of these points, and provides the means to express complex jobs or simple jobs without any special built-in magic support for any one language or framework of the month, especially not at the expense of any others. Although, even a mythical "canonical python subset" would be a strange thing to propose with it's meaninful whitespace, when one of the main complaints about make is the tabs.
- raydev 3y ago
  Pilots and surgeons are following rules to avoid killing people. Make wasn't designed with any of that in mind. It was just one or a few people deciding the easiest path to code, or a style that they preferred. It turns out most people don't find their decisions to be intuitive or explicable even decades later.
amno 3y ago
How is it different to learn Make from any other building tool like Gradle, Scons, Cmake, you name it? Actually, basic is very simple, since the syntax is pretty much like the shell, or I mean, it is more or less shell scripts on steroids.