Re:Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
by nathell on Thursday August 08, 2019 @11:09AM
(#20645266)
> Rake, the Ruby version of Make
That's a common misconception, but people often don't understand what make is. Contrary to the intuition, make is _not_ a build system (like, say, cmake), although build systems can be (and often are) implemented on top of make; nor is it a task runner (like rake).
At its core, make is a declarative expert system (with a very sane design and a very quirky rule syntax). Its area of expertise is updating files. I urge every user of make who hasn't read "Recursive Make Considered Harmful"[1] to do so.
That's a common misconception, but people often don't understand what make is. Contrary to the intuition, make is _not_ a build system (like, say, cmake), although build systems can be (and often are) implemented on top of make; nor is it a task runner (like rake).
At its core, make is a declarative expert system (with a very sane design and a very quirky rule syntax). Its area of expertise is updating files. I urge every user of make who hasn't read "Recursive Make Considered Harmful"[1] to do so.
[1]: http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf