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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 y

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?
    - dagmx 3y ago
      This exactly. the level of work needed to add a dependency in C+Make vs Rust+Cargo is huge.
      - Towaway69 3y ago
        Don't forget, banks still use cobol... Should be replaced... If only someone could! Herein lies the issue for me: should existing projects switch because they are deemed to be gatekeeping when in fact either they are fine with their technology choices or they have not the resources or knowledge to change but they aren't gatekeeping. The external appearance is the same whichever reason might be the truth.
        dagmx 3y ago
        I don’t think anyone’s advocating for changing old projects just for the sake of accessibility, but if someone was able to contribute a change that increases accessibility while preserving functionality, then that’s fine. It’s how a lot of major OSS projects have shifted to cmake from make or scons. Granted cmake isn’t a pinnacle of ease of use either but it’s much easier imho to reason about and integrate with various tooling like IDEs Ideals don’t have to be binary.
  - dagmx 3y ago
    Are people just going to ignore that I have a clear delineation in my comment about the difference of learning and contributing to a project, and instead throw unrelated strawman arguments at me? Driving and programming are different, and learning to program and contributing code to important codebases is different. The stakes are different, the entire paradigms are different. The on ramp to learn to drive is easy relative to actually being trusted/licensed to drive. But do I need to understand how an engine works to learn to drive? No. Maybe I needed to learn how gear changes worked in the day of manual transmission, but today with EVs and CVTs, why should learning stick be a gate to pass? That’s the equivalence of make to C Regardless, all these analogies fall down because the crux of the issue is that if there are better alternatives that prevent issues, it isn’t sensible to keep using the old one. Take your driving analogy. Should we force people to disable proximity sensors? After all you can drive without them but they make driving safer and easier for everyone. Make is much the same way. It gets the job done, that doesn’t mean it’s good at getting the job done when better alternatives exist.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  > 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 This right here. It goes back to my other comment about how those who are proficient with Make don’t understand how esoteric and arcane it is to beginners. The attitude of “well it should be hard, the shouldn’t even learn C if they can’t handle make” is explains why my students love Rust so much. Rust has a sane and standardized build system they prefer to use. Make is the Stone Age to them. And don’t get me wrong, they learn Make. They learn how to use it proficiently and we get through it. But at the end of the class, they will throw Make away and use another language like Rust. They simply do not want to deal with it.
- formulathree 3y ago
  [dead]

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?
  - dagmx 3y ago
    This exactly. the level of work needed to add a dependency in C+Make vs Rust+Cargo is huge.
    - Towaway69 3y ago
      Don't forget, banks still use cobol... Should be replaced... If only someone could! Herein lies the issue for me: should existing projects switch because they are deemed to be gatekeeping when in fact either they are fine with their technology choices or they have not the resources or knowledge to change but they aren't gatekeeping. The external appearance is the same whichever reason might be the truth.
      - dagmx 3y ago
        I don’t think anyone’s advocating for changing old projects just for the sake of accessibility, but if someone was able to contribute a change that increases accessibility while preserving functionality, then that’s fine. It’s how a lot of major OSS projects have shifted to cmake from make or scons. Granted cmake isn’t a pinnacle of ease of use either but it’s much easier imho to reason about and integrate with various tooling like IDEs Ideals don’t have to be binary.
- dagmx 3y ago
  Are people just going to ignore that I have a clear delineation in my comment about the difference of learning and contributing to a project, and instead throw unrelated strawman arguments at me? Driving and programming are different, and learning to program and contributing code to important codebases is different. The stakes are different, the entire paradigms are different. The on ramp to learn to drive is easy relative to actually being trusted/licensed to drive. But do I need to understand how an engine works to learn to drive? No. Maybe I needed to learn how gear changes worked in the day of manual transmission, but today with EVs and CVTs, why should learning stick be a gate to pass? That’s the equivalence of make to C Regardless, all these analogies fall down because the crux of the issue is that if there are better alternatives that prevent issues, it isn’t sensible to keep using the old one. Take your driving analogy. Should we force people to disable proximity sensors? After all you can drive without them but they make driving safer and easier for everyone. Make is much the same way. It gets the job done, that doesn’t mean it’s good at getting the job done when better alternatives exist.
ModernMech 3y ago
> 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 This right here. It goes back to my other comment about how those who are proficient with Make don’t understand how esoteric and arcane it is to beginners. The attitude of “well it should be hard, the shouldn’t even learn C if they can’t handle make” is explains why my students love Rust so much. Rust has a sane and standardized build system they prefer to use. Make is the Stone Age to them. And don’t get me wrong, they learn Make. They learn how to use it proficiently and we get through it. But at the end of the class, they will throw Make away and use another language like Rust. They simply do not want to deal with it.
formulathree 3y ago
[dead]