Linux Fu: The Great Power of Make | Hacker News Reader

Linux Fu: The Great Power of Make

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25 pointsaxiomdata3166 comments

Makefiles really surprised me when I took some time to really learn how to write them. It’s a very elegant language that feels more like a spreadsheet than normal coding. Don’t judge me, but I think that the Makefile language is one of those that will make you a better programmer overall after learning it. Give it a try!

I often miss “make”. I suspect if there were no such thing as MS WIndows, we would all (still) be using make, rather than each language having a handful of competing build tools.

Code generation used to be trivial, as well, rather than having to write “plugins” in XML build tool N.

Semi-related, I love this article by Mike Bostock about using Make to capture some design/data workflows: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/

I fiddled with this idea and made a Makefile that downloads a book from the Internet Archive, extracts all the illustrations and tweaks them with ImageMagick: https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips/blob/master/Mak...

This isn't the smartest Makefile... I've learned a bit since. Regardless, I find it really fun to smoosh a process into a dependency graph frame-of-mind.

Does anybody else have any examples of "non-traditional" uses of Make? Anything beyond compiling code or using it as a straightforward task runner?

A former college introduced me to make as alternative for custom build scripting (bash) I wrote for some Python projects. I always assumed it could only be used for C style projects where you had compile steps and such, but it's so much more and I haven't looked back since. Make is almost as ubiquitous as shell script on any working environment and the mix of its own declarative syntax and 'regular' imperative script allows almost any task to be modelled.

If only Maven were replaced with Make (in the Java world).

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