Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Glad to see there are so many enlightened souls in this thread who wield their well-configured flaming swords of truth against the darkness between the non-whitespaces.

I for one was eternally flustered as a new programmer in college trying to edit Makefiles with the tools that I felt comfortable with and that were available to me. The tab/space debacle is a completely unnecessary footgun, even worse than the various atrocities of variable assignment spacing and test bracket spacing in `sh`. I am grateful for Make to exist in that it is an important part of the history of Unix and software development, but would rather not use it if given the option.

I for one graciously accept Stuart Feldman's apology.

  C begot Unix
  Unix begot Make
  And Make begot the 10_000 things

Speaking of the shell, Makefiles aren't the only place in Unix where tabs are significant. The sh Here-Document (aka heredoc) "<<-" operator strips leading tabs, but not spaces, from a block of text.

I'm in the tabs for indentation camp, but even I was a little surprised by this, as I had always assumed the semantics were to match and strip whatever leading whitespace was found on the first line. When I emulate this feature in other languages (e.g. heredoc function in tandem with a language's multiline string quotation), that's the semantic I employ, even though in my own code that leading whitespace will invariably be all tabs.

Eternally flustered, really? Over that? Come now.

This is not something I'd be proud to announce or expect well-configured cooling showers of sympathy.

As a developer or sysadmin, among the problems I have to solve every random hour of every day, this one rates all the way up there with the printer being across the room.

Make is actually good. I used to try and avoid it. Many have tried to make something better and its always more complex than make and probably slower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com