Comment by 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.

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.

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