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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

As a professional I can believe it too. Most of my colleagues are fine if they have some existing code and need to modify it, or add a feature following the pattern of the existing code, and that is 90% of what a developer does in the real world. A completely blank screen tho' and even I hesitate. Almost every new project I start actually starts as a skeleton from another, here's my Makefile, here's my usual basic imports, command-line parsing block, etc etc. Once I get some momentum going it's fine...

The fact is that computer science is not software development, any more than you could take an astronomer, drop him on a ship and say "navigate!".

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There is a simple solution to this. Start with a working program that doesn't do what you want, and incrementally make it into the one you want.

It doesn't matter what the original program does. I cannot count how many times I started with a program that printed Hello, world and wound up with with something useful and unrelated.

That is how most programs are written, but it really helps to have some existing structure, such as an app framework. Also I suspect there has only ever been one Makefile, that has been copied and tweaked millions of times by millions of people over the years...

Why do you think that?

Personally I write all my makefiles from scratch. I'm always baffled by other makefiles though. They always look so huge and for some unknown reason just overly complex.

Really? I've been using the same one for the last 15 years, and before me it was owned by an old geezer. Some people say I should try some newfangled nonsense like Ant, but make has never let me down.

Ant, waf, and the rest of them are usually overkill IMHO. With makefiles the basics are simple and straightforward and I'd argue that most uses only require the basics, it's like what I've been hearing about autotools these days but even autotools seems overkill especially on Linux where we've had proper pkgconfig support everywhere for years. The same is probably true for the BSDs as well. I can't comment on Windows or OS X as I have no experince there but I imagine it must be easier to write a couple basic makefiles for 2 differnt platforms if you need. Most cross platform projects don't need as they either use Gtk, glib, Qt, etc which already pulls in all their dependencies.

Now you know the reason ;)

I have a co-worker. This co-worker can't solve problems. He just lacks the ability completely. Give him an existing code base and an error, and he has NO IDEA how to proceed.

Contrariwise, if he has to write something from scratch he can... as long as it's entirely stand alone and not too complex.

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