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Comment by nicky0 | Hacker News Reader

(1) I imagine quite a lot of this site's visitors use different platforms/toolchains, and haven't encountered make. (2) Its a fun/joke title, the article is for "hipsters", the kind who know the latest fancy build tools but not make, I suppose. I wouldn't take it too seriously. (3) It's a disclaimer against people attacking him for errors, and also to warn people that he's not an expert. Again, this is written in a lighthearted way. (4) See 3. (5) Maybe, or maybe you are just feeling cranky today.

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If not a ruse, this is a dumb post that discredits itself and calls makefiles hacky, not noticing that they are used by many people for most native programming on most (unix type) platforms.

I'm feeling cranky every day, but just today this post is at the top of hacker news, and that's frustrating.

The refusal of so many people in this industry to learn a pretty simple and incredibly fundamental tool frustrates me no end.

I guess this article could be worse: the number of times I see people reimplement poorly thought out clones of make and present them as the new thing that everyone should use is just absurd.

You are frustrated about people not learning this tool, any yet when someone publishes an article encouraging people to learn that very tool, you damn it?

For simple use cases, Make is simple (and lovely, in my opinion). For moderate to complex cases, Makes syntax and contortions you have to put yourself into to work around the barrier between what Make expects and how certain things can be done today can cause a bit of pain.

That said, you can prize Make out of my cold dead hands. Still my favourite build tool, and damned powerful once you learn to tame it.

The gist of the post is that make is preferable to modern build systems. The author has used self-depracating humour to defend himself against attacks, but clearly it was too dry.

If we stopped attacking the authors of articles, then it would be easier for them to write openly and less defensively, but unfortunately if you write anything on the internet, people will call you an idiot.

Why would it frustrate you that this is something people want to learn?

There are plenty of valid reasons why an established developer would never use Make, namely integration with the rest of their 'ecosystem'. Also, there's plenty of reasons for everyone to get in and use Make where appropriate.

>If not a ruse, this is a dumb post that discredits itself and calls makefiles hacky, not noticing that they are used by many people for most native programming on most (unix type) platforms.

Bah, you just take things too literally, and can't process/appreciate some obvious and light-hearted cultural signs.

A post that makes a joke comment != a post that discredits itself.

A post that warns that its own makefiles might be hacky != a post that calls makefiles inherently hacky (in fact this is obvious, since the post's goal is the inverse: to promote Make to people).

A post that tries to introduce Make to a whole bunch of devs who don't know about it != a post that doesn't notice that Make is used by many people for native programming on unices

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