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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 i

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.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  Point taken but why is learning yaml easier then learning make? It seems that if its about the amount that needs to be learnt then we'll get nowhere. Make is easy for certain folks, yaml for others. If a project has been using make for years, should they be forced to replace it since someone believes they are gatekeeping? What happens if said project rejects a pull request that replaces said makefile with task file requiring python and yaml? I'm pragmatic and also say if it gets the job done OK, but must I replace make with task if someone suggests I'm gatekeeping just because I have a pragmatic point of view?
  - dagmx 3y ago
    the point isn’t to replace existing use. To take your analogy of cars, we aren’t retrofitting cars with new tech. But maybe it means that new projects use a more accessible build system. I’m not saying Task is the answer, I’m just saying Make is an issue for a lot of reasons like accessibility and portability to multiple toolchains and systems. If you’re just coding for yourself, it’s not important. Nobody is saying you should change. But if you’re coding for an ecosystem, it’s always worth evaluating where changes can be made and then evaluating case by case if the pros outweigh the cons.

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.

Towaway69 3y ago
Point taken but why is learning yaml easier then learning make? It seems that if its about the amount that needs to be learnt then we'll get nowhere. Make is easy for certain folks, yaml for others. If a project has been using make for years, should they be forced to replace it since someone believes they are gatekeeping? What happens if said project rejects a pull request that replaces said makefile with task file requiring python and yaml? I'm pragmatic and also say if it gets the job done OK, but must I replace make with task if someone suggests I'm gatekeeping just because I have a pragmatic point of view?
- dagmx 3y ago
  the point isn’t to replace existing use. To take your analogy of cars, we aren’t retrofitting cars with new tech. But maybe it means that new projects use a more accessible build system. I’m not saying Task is the answer, I’m just saying Make is an issue for a lot of reasons like accessibility and portability to multiple toolchains and systems. If you’re just coding for yourself, it’s not important. Nobody is saying you should change. But if you’re coding for an ecosystem, it’s always worth evaluating where changes can be made and then evaluating case by case if the pros outweigh the cons.