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Comment by yuppiepuppie

7 months ago

This is “Copy-Pasta Driven Development” [0] and it’s not even related to makefiles. It’s related to the entire industry copying code from here to there without even knowing what they are copying.

TBH I think copilot has made this even worse, as we are blindly accepting chucks of code into our code bases.

[0] https://andrew.grahamyooll.com/blog/copy-pasta-driven-develo...

4 comments

yuppiepuppie

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pdimitar  7 months ago

Blame the business people. I tried becoming an expert in `make` probably at least 7 times in a row, was never given time to work with it daily until I fully memorized it.

At one point I simply gave up; you can never build the muscle memory and it becomes a cryptic arcane knowledge you have to relearn from scratch every time you need it. So I moved to simpler tools.

The loss of deep work is not the good programmers' fault. It's the fault of the business people.

  • skydhash  7 months ago

    I wouldn't say so. Make is very simple and you can grasp the basis within an hour or so, if you're familiar with shell scripting (as it's basically a superset of shell scripts, with the dependency graph on top). Then all you have to do is just in time learning which is mostly searching for a simpler pattern that what you're currently doing.

    • pdimitar  7 months ago

      Hm, I'm not sure that's the case. Some of make's weirdness comes from bash-isms, not shell scripting in particular.