While they might think they know what's going on, I'm not convinced they actually do. C can be an incredibly subtle language to get right...
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...
Regarding make, the thing to realize there is that it's just a DSL for specifying a dependency graph (and the way for satisfying dependencies). It's not a hard concept, but unless you come to the field with a bit of computer science background, it's not likely something you've been directly exposed to at the level required to understand make. But I don't know that this means make's choice of abstraction is necessarily a bad thing for its intended use cases. I also think this tends to put the lie to the notion that the difficulty is mainly around tabs... tabs may obscure the details, but switching to a clearer syntax won't solve the more fundamental gaps in understanding the mechanics of make.
I'll also argue that this is a potential problem with DSL's in general... because DSL's often don't use traditional imperative language semantics, there's always a bit of a learning curve that needs to be ascended. However, for make at least, there are a useful debugging tools to help understand what it's actually doing.
For me, at least, 'make -n' is great in that it instructs make to resolve the dependency graph based on the current state, and then just print the commands it'll run without executing them. If you know what the commands do, and know what needs to run, this can be a huge help understanding what's going on. (And there are other more powerful debugging capabilities as well for dumping variables, etc.)
As with many 'simplified' DSLs that are often unsuited to the task at hand (e.g. C++ templating), make (or versions of it, anyway), evolved to accommodate these use cases and then morphed into something that accidentally became turing complete: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3480950/are-makefiles-tu...
Isn't a C++ template the exact opposite of 'Domain Specific'?
Make is not a needlessly complex tool (unlike most garbage tools these days); it’s complex because it needs to be flexible enough to build any programmer’s software. Since ways to program and build software are infinite, the tool itself cannot be simple, otherwise trade-offs have to be made.
'make' exists for what it's capable of doing and it must be so as it's used in every piece of software and operating sytem everywhere.
So it's extremely popular/widespread, therefore it must be good, and therefore you should use it (thereby making it even more popular/widespread)?
I really hope that you poorly worded that/I'm grossly misunderstanding you because otherwise, your logic is batshit insane.
My experience has been that that people that truly understand and appreciate technology for its own sake are also likely to underestimate the value of a tool being popular and widespread. What 'popular' really means is that the tool is more likely to be where you need it to be and the people you need to use it will already know how. Those things outweigh a 'perfectly' designed tool that you don't have or know how to use.
There's a balance point, for sure. For instance, the pace of "innovation" in front-end javascript libraries throws out a lot of babies with the bathwater, and we might be well-served by accepting a paradigm for 10 minutes and building on it rather than always chasing after the next hot thing.
But at the other extreme, there was a time when PHP was ubiquitous for back-end development, and it stuck around largely because of inertia: the obvious flaws were accepted just because it was so accepted as the tool for that job. But I don't think many people are lamenting the fact that we've moved on to better tools for back-end development. In that case inertia was a bad thing because it delayed innovation.
For me an example of a "good enough" tool is GIT. It's not perfect, it's got a non-trivial learning curve, and surely some innovations could be made to improve version control. Some would already argue that Mercurial is the Betamax to GIT's VHS - but it does the job well enough, and everybody uses it, so it's good enough.
I'd argue Make is more like PHP than it is GIT.
Exactly this.
> I'd argue Make is more like PHP than it is GIT.
What would you want a make replacement to look like?
Make is pretty 'roll your own' in places, but I've found it to have a nice balance between expressiveness and terseness. For simple projects, there isn't much to do in make, and for the more complex projects I've been involved in (embedded work, a self-hosting compiler, etc.) make can still generally express the build process within the confines of Makefile syntax. (In contrast to more modern tools that might require plugins in a different language, etc.)
For the compiler project I mention, the build process includes building several executables in C, running them against a pre-built VM image to compile another VM image, translating that image into C code that is then compiled and linked into the VM to produce another executable, after which there's a unit test suite. Root rebuild command is 'make clean && make tested', and there are only a couple hundred lines of Makefile code to get there. (There's also cross-compile support, etc.)
I'll admit that there was a certain amount of effort involved in writing those Makefiles, but I've also implemented the same build process using a modern GUI tool and found it to be much more difficult.
Admittedly I haven't given a ton of thought to this specific problem, but here goes:
I actually like Make from a conceptual standpoint. I think it's a good idea to codify build orchestration in code rather than non-human-readable output from a GUI application. My main gripe is that it seems to be very much a 1.0 tool: it was build to solve a specific problem, and then features were added as needed. I would love to have an iteration on that concept which benefits from what we've learned from Make while rounding off the rough edges of what feels like the result of a largely ad-hoc design process.
As far as what that would look like: I would like to see a concise, low-level API for doing the kinds of things Makefiles do (i.e. defining a dependency graph, setting up build parameters etc), and better tools for composition.
Also I would sacrifice a bit of terseness for the benefit of readability. For instance an arbitrary keyword like `Phony` could be replaced by a more extensible name-spacing syntax which lets you know exactly what's going on.
But the question is whether this is Make's fault for being incomprehensible, or the User's fault for being lazy.
The thing is virtually any system or tool can be understood with enough practice, but just because there is someone out there who can use it well does not mean it's not poorly designed.
Both C and Make are decades-old technologies, but most people can read a C file without much experience and intuitively understand what is going on. The same is not true for Makefiles.