Hacker News Reader

A lot of the web development community, especially the section that I get the impression smashingmagazine caters to, doesn't know much about Unix or C programming. If they've heard of make, they probably know it as "that ancient cryptic tool for compiling C++ programs" or "that command that I typed to install that one program on Mac".

I hope this doesn't come across as condescending, if they can get by fine without using make then there's no reason they ought to be expected to be familiar with it.

The article says it is OS X. Maybe this is because of Apple not wanting to use something licensed under GPL-3?

OS X ships with that version of Make.

Ubuntu Trusty ships with 3.81