Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

So, the 'easy on ramp guided path' to being allowed to pilot a plane or practice medecine, is as easy or even in the same universe with writing a makefile? Do you hear yourself? Talk about invalid arguments holy shit!

The easy on ramp was it was totally free and permissionless to learn how to write a Makefile, or read a bunch of existing ones, or countless howtos, and that a basic makefile is basic and you don't need to figure out the arcane bits until you want to, and at no point ever do you need a license no matter how easy or guided the path.

You can be a poor 10 year old in a 3rd world country and write a Makefile. No gates kept.

It's a depressing outlook on life to see something as simple a useful as make as some kind of problem where the supposedly superior answer is something ridiculous like python.

The fact that anyone even for one second thinks these are reasonable thoughts is what is truly depressing.

View on HN

Is anger and derision your default state of discourse? Both your responses so far have been just completely over the top in both regards.

But putting that aside, you don’t think Make has a ton of footguns for someone starting out?

Spaces vs tabs for different bits because of decades of legacy? Oh but most editors default to tabs as spaces and suddenly no matter what you do, following tutorials will still fail.

Or you try and mess around with an existing open source project to learn from it. You want to list the targets? Oh wait, there’s no standard way to examine the makefile without understanding Make first.

If people consider Make easy to learn, imho they haven’t really reflected on how much more streamlined the rest of the software engineering ecosystem is, and how it benefits everyone from new programmers to experienced devs. I’m not the one saying it should be Python, I’m just saying Make is not a good solution in this day and age, when so many other ecosystems have shown they can have better on-boarding experiences.

Anyway I won’t respond further. Feel free to rage reply as you want.

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?

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?

This exactly.

the level of work needed to add a dependency in C+Make vs Rust+Cargo is huge.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Accessible is merely an opinion not a fact or an argument backed by a fact.

Make is the definition of portable for that job, so that was a weird argument to try to make.

I see a consistent pattern of unfounded argument from someone who has nothing more than "old=bad" or "new=progress"

> Should we force people to disable proximity sensors? After all you can drive without them but they make driving safer and easier for everyone.

I think your analogy is quite bad here. You ain't giving people proximity sensors or parking cameras or automatic parking. You are exchanging a good, comfortable vehicle we all know how to drive for a new type of vehicle with clearly worse ergonomics and forcing everyone to re-learn how to drive.

Once part of designing cars is that we can sit down in any car and just drive it. Perhaps we need to look up some minor and less important details, but we are guaranteed some very basic operation: how the blinking lights work, how to operate gas, brakes, steering wheel and manual transmission. I do think that they have messed up with short/long lights and back gears. That should have also been the same on all cars. But the basics are the same.

Makefile uses shell scripts for the recipes and shell variables, which makes Make an extension to the shell. There are differences, of course, but basics are very, very simple to get to learn. I learned 30+ years ago by just looking at other makefile and basically copying the details for my projects. I am still not even a very advanced makefile writer, I still lookup what automatic variables do, which one do I want and which functions I can use when I need them.

> If people consider Make easy to learn, imho they haven’t really reflected on how much more streamlined the rest of the software engineering ecosystem is

This right here. It goes back to my other comment about how those who are proficient with Make don’t understand how esoteric and arcane it is to beginners.

The attitude of “well it should be hard, the shouldn’t even learn C if they can’t handle make” is explains why my students love Rust so much. Rust has a sane and standardized build system they prefer to use. Make is the Stone Age to them.

And don’t get me wrong, they learn Make. They learn how to use it proficiently and we get through it. But at the end of the class, they will throw Make away and use another language like Rust. They simply do not want to deal with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com