This is from 2012. There's a bunch of HN comments about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188 . This

This is from 2012. There's a bunch of HN comments about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188 . This feels like a Baby Boomer berating Gen X for being slackers. But the author is Gen X, so that's not, strictly speaking, true. It's an early Gen-Xer berating the late Gen-Xers, sorry, wunderkinder. Except even then, it's not. The author didn't start to program until 1989. The autoconf author (David Mackenzie) chose m4 in 1991, and was programming since at least 1987, says https://ffkp.se/2012/04/13/old-interviews-david-mackenzie/ https://ffkp.se/2012/04/13/old-interviews-david-mackenzie/ . Thus, choosing M4 isn't one of the dot-com era disasters. It's a disaster, certainly. BTW, M4 was chosen because: > I [David Mackenzie] considered using Perl to generate my style of configure scripts, but decided that M4 was better suited to the job of simple textual substitutions: it gets in the way less, because output is implicit. Plus, everyone already has it. (Initially I didn't rely on the GNU extensions to M4.) Also, some of my friends at the University of Maryland had recently been putting M4 front ends on several programs, including tvtwm, and I was interested in trying out a new language. - https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.67/html_node/Exodus.html https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.67/h... Portable tools got people (like me) to switch to GNU make, and GNU awk, and other GNU tools in order to get away from the non-portability of OS vendor tools. Which made it much easier to switch Linux with a GNU user space. Remember, GNU's Not Unix :) "carefully designed cathedrals of the pre-dot-com years" Romanticism for days of yore. "make" isn't a cathedral. Nor is "m4".