It’s almost comical to see “why Python” comments after all these years. I would’ve chosen Go to write this, but that’s beside the point.
Yes, Python installation is tricky, dependency management is a mess (even with uv, since it’s not standard tooling; another one will pop up), and performance is atrocious. But even then, some Python libraries have bigger communities than the combined communities of all these “better, faster, more awesome” languages.
Python is here to stay. Newcomers love it because you need to know so little to get started. People don’t care about the little quirks when they begin, and eventually they just live with the warts. That’s fine. LLMs write better Python than Go (my preferred language, or whatever yours is). And if you know anything about the AI research community, it’s C++, C, Python or GTFO.
Going forward, a lot more tools will be written in Python, mostly by people entering the field. On top of that, there’s a huge number of active Python veterans churning out code faster than ever. The network effect keeps on giving.
So whatever language you have in mind, it’s going to be niche compared to Python or JS. I don’t like it either. But if languages and tools were chosen on merit instead of tribalism, we wouldn’t be in this JS clusterfuck on the web.
some Makefiles use indents or var placement as semantic cues. if a tool rewrites them mechanically, it might clean things while killing meaning. is structural correctness enough, or do we need formatters that preserve human context too?
Ideally, we'd have linters that preserve the human context as well. But human context may be too ambiguous and high variance enough that it can be impractical.
It's hard to say what's intent and what not, maybe linters with many custom rules would work best.
Why not Python? I primarily program in C++ but I see it as a decent choice as Python is available in almost all recent machines. Of course Windows is a notable exception but given it's a tool for developers I guess Python should be present.
The number of issues we've had with pre-commit because it's written in Python and Python tooling breaks constantly...
In fairness, the latter point may be finally solved by using `uv` and `uv tool install`. Performance is still a major issue though. Yamllint is easily the slowest linter we use.
(I'm tempted to try rewriting it in Rust with AI.)
It definitely is a problem when the tool you're going to use a few times a week takes an extra hundred milliseconds compared to a native solution. Especially when you need to process huge data files like hand crafted makefiles. I can totally feel your pain - extra effort would've been made to avoid that at the cost of development speed. /s
I find that writing anything substantially complex in python sacrifices the development speed. That isn't its strong suit. It's that a lot of people want to write their code in it by preference.
Yeah if only it was an extra 100 milliseconds a few times a week. We have yamllint (also written in Python) in our pre-commit (also written in Python) and it definitely adds a second or two.
I am not saying it is weird, I was just responding to parent with regarding to "string manipulation", and someone mentioned "performance", so I stated two facts about Perl.
I do not care whether or not this project is written in Python. Sure, he chose Python because he is more familiar with it. That is fair enough to me.
I would've chosen Java because it's faster than Python and is good for string manipulation. My cousin would've chosen Brainfuck because he's really good at it. Alas, this discussion is useless because none of us are the one who spent the effort to write the Makefile formatter and linter, we can only bikeshed all day about what decisions we would've taken
For the 100th time, I was responding to "[...] python and it is easy to do string manipulation with.". Perl is way better to do string processing in than Java, too, FWIW.
My comment has absolutely nothing to do with this project or its author, nor the language he has chosen. See the other comments in this thread.
It really is though. When I was on the journey to find the fastest interpreted scripting languages, Perl and LuaJIT were one of the fastest ones, meaning Python is slower than both of these languages.
It does not invalidate anything I have said, and this reasoning of yours is so flawed.
For example: I thought this or that music or movie sucked. I do not need to know how to make a song or a movie to be able to criticize it, let alone have one in a similar vain, same with books. I can criticize a book, or an article, without having written one myself on related topics.
All that said, where did I criticize? I did not criticize anything, at all.
I stated facts. Perl is indeed faster than Python, and Perl was indeed made with string manipulation in mind. I made no comment about this project or its author, thus, it was not a criticism of any sort.
I do not care about movie makers and singers in general, and for the most part I do not have direct contact with them, so it would be futile to offer any advice. I did offer advice to a couple of singers before though. What is your point besides being unnecessarily defensive over two simple, stated facts? As I said, it was not a criticism of the author or the project, it was a response to your comment. Since this is going to lead nowhere, I am going to stop responding to this thread.
Make allows you to specify dependencies for you targets, which are also targets. As such you do not need to rely on brittle string concatenation approaches. It is a tool build for this.
I personally like going to a project folder and run "make run", no matter what language or setup I have, to run the project. It enables me to unify access to projects.
I also take great care to make these runs reproducible, using lock files and other things of the ecosystems I am using, whenever possible. I work on another machine? git clone, make run. Or perhaps git clone, make init, make run.
I'm not so sure most people would agree with you. Though I think plenty would.
I dare say that developers like environment variables more than before. Consider that Docker images, and hence Helm charts, are entirely controlled via environment variables. These very popular dev tools suffer from the same problem of having near-zero easy discoverability of what those environment variables might be. Yet they are very popular.
But I don't think Make usually uses all that many environment variables. You're usually specifying build targets as the command line arguments. Automake and autogen usually generate these makefiles with everything hard-coded.
Also, it makes it very easy to get started with, and it is universally available. Makes it very easy to like.
Unless your company forces you to use Windows, which is still much more common than many would like to admit. And yes, WSL exists, but in my experience, if a company is unwilling to allow macOS, there’s a good chance they either don’t allow enabling HyperV, or the security software they use is such garbage that it results in a HyperV enabled system being effectively unusable.
Dunno, there are other aspects of environment variables that deteriorate the dev experience. They're very conducive to spooky action at a distance, since they're silently being passed along from parent-process to child-process (except when they aren't).
They can cause a lot of annoying bugs, and sometimes it's hard to track down where they are coming from (especially when dealing with stuff running in containers).
> Interacting with CLI tools using only env vars as arguments is cartoonishly bad dev experience.
Make excels at what it's design to do: specify a configurable DAG of tasks that generate artifacts, execute them, and automatically determine which subgraph requires updates and which can be skipped by reusing their artifacts.
I wonder: which tool do you believe does this better than Make?
I don't think Tup managed to present any case. Glancing at the page, the only conceivable synthetic scenarios where they can present Tup in a positive light is built times of > 10k files, and only in a synthetic scenario involving recompiling partially built projects. And what's the upside of those synthetic scenarios? Shaving w couple of seconds in rebuilds? That's hardly a compelling scenario.
Abuse? Runnig linters, code analysers, configuration tools, template engines, spellcheckers, pulling dependencies, building dependencies with different build systems.
Sufficiently complex project need to invole alot of wierd extra scripts, and if a build system cannot fulfil it... the n it needs to be wrapped in a complex bash script anyway.
You don't have to write Make invocations by hand... It's just a tool that can be called from any editor or IDE (or by automatic file watchers). Environment variables aren't really relevant to Make either, unless you really want to misuse it as a command runner.
I often prefer to work in in extremis environments where there is no internet access, and hence, no easy way to get ahold of make; it's given me a bad habit of just waiting a build.bash script to do what make does most of the time. I haven't really found myself missing it that much.
If you can install bash on your airgapped dev box, why wouldn't you install make on it? Make is part of the core dev environment on just about every disto under the sun.
I am confused, because this means that you won't be able to install anything. No compiler, no 3rd party libraries and no text editor that isn't preinstalled
It's 80% of what you want and it's installed everywhere.
You could go for something closer to exactly what you want, but now you've got an extra set up step for devs and something else for people to learn if they want to change it.
I would say if you're looking for cli args then you shouldn't be using any wrapper like make at all. Just call the underlying tool directly. Make is for doing big high level things in the standard way, nowadays quite often in CI pipelines.
Yep, that's how I used it on the job before. "make test" would run tests locally and in CI pipeline, keeping the CI file refreshingly short at that point.
I am quite certain to have used such kind of tooling during 1990's, with ads on The C/C++ Users Journal and Dr. Dobbs developer magazines.
It wouldn't have been Matthias Andrée's makel, then.
* https://git.maandree.se/makel
Or unmake.
* https://crates.io/crates/unmake
Or checkmake.
* https://github.com/checkmake/checkmake (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32460375)
Or make-audit.
* https://github.com/david-a-wheeler/make-audit
Or the Sublime linter for makefiles.
* https://github.com/giampaolo/SublimeLinter-contrib-makefile
It hasn't taken quite the 50 years that we are told, has it? (-:
Thanks for the tool. This is pretty neat.
It’s almost comical to see “why Python” comments after all these years. I would’ve chosen Go to write this, but that’s beside the point.
Yes, Python installation is tricky, dependency management is a mess (even with uv, since it’s not standard tooling; another one will pop up), and performance is atrocious. But even then, some Python libraries have bigger communities than the combined communities of all these “better, faster, more awesome” languages.
Python is here to stay. Newcomers love it because you need to know so little to get started. People don’t care about the little quirks when they begin, and eventually they just live with the warts. That’s fine. LLMs write better Python than Go (my preferred language, or whatever yours is). And if you know anything about the AI research community, it’s C++, C, Python or GTFO.
Going forward, a lot more tools will be written in Python, mostly by people entering the field. On top of that, there’s a huge number of active Python veterans churning out code faster than ever. The network effect keeps on giving.
So whatever language you have in mind, it’s going to be niche compared to Python or JS. I don’t like it either. But if languages and tools were chosen on merit instead of tribalism, we wouldn’t be in this JS clusterfuck on the web.
some Makefiles use indents or var placement as semantic cues. if a tool rewrites them mechanically, it might clean things while killing meaning. is structural correctness enough, or do we need formatters that preserve human context too?
Ideally, we'd have linters that preserve the human context as well. But human context may be too ambiguous and high variance enough that it can be impractical.
It's hard to say what's intent and what not, maybe linters with many custom rules would work best.
That doesn't sound any different than it is for any other programming language, but many people prefer automatic formatting anyways.
Nice, would be good to package this as a https://pre-commit.com/ hook.
Does this support inline ignoring specific rules with some syntax? Couldn’t find this from the README. Would be good to have as an escape hatch.
Here's an AUR package:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/python-bake-git
Differences to checkmake, the older Makefile's linter and formatter?
It really doesn’t have to be complicated for it to be useful. Plenty thanks for sharing this.
ewwww. consolidated phony lines. everyone knows these should be right before each rule declaration.
Seems like from the README this can be disabled
I think the visual clutter of .PHONY on each recipe declaration is better since there’s always a lot of copy-paste coding.ive always wanted this. im going to give it a go!
does this happen to support IDE like vscode?
From the readme:
thanks! apologies i was on mobile and missed this. im excited to try it out
simple use rake
or any other task runner
Uh, why Python?
Why not Python? I primarily program in C++ but I see it as a decent choice as Python is available in almost all recent machines. Of course Windows is a notable exception but given it's a tool for developers I guess Python should be present.
1. Terrible performance.
2. Terrible installation UX.
The number of issues we've had with pre-commit because it's written in Python and Python tooling breaks constantly...
In fairness, the latter point may be finally solved by using `uv` and `uv tool install`. Performance is still a major issue though. Yamllint is easily the slowest linter we use.
(I'm tempted to try rewriting it in Rust with AI.)
It definitely is a problem when the tool you're going to use a few times a week takes an extra hundred milliseconds compared to a native solution. Especially when you need to process huge data files like hand crafted makefiles. I can totally feel your pain - extra effort would've been made to avoid that at the cost of development speed. /s
I find that writing anything substantially complex in python sacrifices the development speed. That isn't its strong suit. It's that a lot of people want to write their code in it by preference.
Yeah if only it was an extra 100 milliseconds a few times a week. We have yamllint (also written in Python) in our pre-commit (also written in Python) and it definitely adds a second or two.
Also format-on-save is a common workflow.
Terrible portability across platforms specially with dependencies.
Presumably because the author is comfortable with python and it is easy to do string manipulation with.
Perl is much faster than Python, and it is especially good for string manipulation. Thus, I would have chosen Perl.
Almost everybody knows python these days, almost nobody knows Perl. It's not weird that OP chose a language they already knew.
I am not saying it is weird, I was just responding to parent with regarding to "string manipulation", and someone mentioned "performance", so I stated two facts about Perl.
I do not care whether or not this project is written in Python. Sure, he chose Python because he is more familiar with it. That is fair enough to me.
I would've chosen Java because it's faster than Python and is good for string manipulation. My cousin would've chosen Brainfuck because he's really good at it. Alas, this discussion is useless because none of us are the one who spent the effort to write the Makefile formatter and linter, we can only bikeshed all day about what decisions we would've taken
For the 100th time, I was responding to "[...] python and it is easy to do string manipulation with.". Perl is way better to do string processing in than Java, too, FWIW.
My comment has absolutely nothing to do with this project or its author, nor the language he has chosen. See the other comments in this thread.
Perl is absolutely not faster than Python, not even for regexes.
It really is though. When I was on the journey to find the fastest interpreted scripting languages, Perl and LuaJIT were one of the fastest ones, meaning Python is slower than both of these languages.
Perl is always faster than python. Python is just absurdly bad in performance
Would you be willing to share the link to your repo?
I have not written a Makefile formatter and linker in any languages.
Yes, I thought so. It's much easier to criticize than to create.
I will remember that the next time some voices an opinion at the sports bar.
It does not invalidate anything I have said, and this reasoning of yours is so flawed.
For example: I thought this or that music or movie sucked. I do not need to know how to make a song or a movie to be able to criticize it, let alone have one in a similar vain, same with books. I can criticize a book, or an article, without having written one myself on related topics.
All that said, where did I criticize? I did not criticize anything, at all.
I stated facts. Perl is indeed faster than Python, and Perl was indeed made with string manipulation in mind. I made no comment about this project or its author, thus, it was not a criticism of any sort.
Do you regularly offer your directorial opinions to movie makers and singers? Or is it just programmers?
I do not care about movie makers and singers in general, and for the most part I do not have direct contact with them, so it would be futile to offer any advice. I did offer advice to a couple of singers before though. What is your point besides being unnecessarily defensive over two simple, stated facts? As I said, it was not a criticism of the author or the project, it was a response to your comment. Since this is going to lead nowhere, I am going to stop responding to this thread.
I don't understand why people like make so much. Interacting with CLI tools using only env vars as arguments is cartoonishly bad dev experience.
Make allows you to specify dependencies for you targets, which are also targets. As such you do not need to rely on brittle string concatenation approaches. It is a tool build for this.
I personally like going to a project folder and run "make run", no matter what language or setup I have, to run the project. It enables me to unify access to projects.
I also take great care to make these runs reproducible, using lock files and other things of the ecosystems I am using, whenever possible. I work on another machine? git clone, make run. Or perhaps git clone, make init, make run.
I'm not so sure most people would agree with you. Though I think plenty would.
I dare say that developers like environment variables more than before. Consider that Docker images, and hence Helm charts, are entirely controlled via environment variables. These very popular dev tools suffer from the same problem of having near-zero easy discoverability of what those environment variables might be. Yet they are very popular.
But I don't think Make usually uses all that many environment variables. You're usually specifying build targets as the command line arguments. Automake and autogen usually generate these makefiles with everything hard-coded.
Also, it makes it very easy to get started with, and it is universally available. Makes it very easy to like.
Make is in POSIX, so it's generally available. Same reason people write shell scripts (even if the scripts are not generally POSIX-only).
Unless your company forces you to use Windows, which is still much more common than many would like to admit. And yes, WSL exists, but in my experience, if a company is unwilling to allow macOS, there’s a good chance they either don’t allow enabling HyperV, or the security software they use is such garbage that it results in a HyperV enabled system being effectively unusable.
Windows 11 requires Hyper-V turned on, virtualization based security is one of the reasons of the forced hardware upgrades.
I like it because it's language and tooling agnostic, declarative, fast and ubiquitous.
Where it's less great is complicated recipes and debugging
Make is not language agnostic; it has implicit rules for compiling C.
it also has implicit rules for other languages, why would that make it non-agnostic?
You can pass arguments via the command line (it is, after all, a CLI tool): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2826029/passing-addition...
I mean there's really not much difference between "VAR=val make x" and "make x VAR=val" now is there?
Syntactically? No. Semantically? Yes.
I'm guessing the syntax was the part the poster was complaining about when they complained about the "dev experience".
Dunno, there are other aspects of environment variables that deteriorate the dev experience. They're very conducive to spooky action at a distance, since they're silently being passed along from parent-process to child-process (except when they aren't).
They can cause a lot of annoying bugs, and sometimes it's hard to track down where they are coming from (especially when dealing with stuff running in containers).
> Interacting with CLI tools using only env vars as arguments is cartoonishly bad dev experience.
Make excels at what it's design to do: specify a configurable DAG of tasks that generate artifacts, execute them, and automatically determine which subgraph requires updates and which can be skipped by reusing their artifacts.
I wonder: which tool do you believe does this better than Make?
Tup. https://gittup.org/tup/ https://gittup.org/tup/make_vs_tup.html
But the Internet’s make mind-share means you still have to know make.
Edit: and make lets you use make to essentially run scripts/utils. People love to abuse make for that. Can’t do that with tup.
> Tup.
I don't think Tup managed to present any case. Glancing at the page, the only conceivable synthetic scenarios where they can present Tup in a positive light is built times of > 10k files, and only in a synthetic scenario involving recompiling partially built projects. And what's the upside of those synthetic scenarios? Shaving w couple of seconds in rebuilds? That's hardly a compelling scenario.
Abuse? Runnig linters, code analysers, configuration tools, template engines, spellcheckers, pulling dependencies, building dependencies with different build systems.
Sufficiently complex project need to invole alot of wierd extra scripts, and if a build system cannot fulfil it... the n it needs to be wrapped in a complex bash script anyway.
You don't have to write Make invocations by hand... It's just a tool that can be called from any editor or IDE (or by automatic file watchers). Environment variables aren't really relevant to Make either, unless you really want to misuse it as a command runner.
Because make is a prolog in disguise.
I often prefer to work in in extremis environments where there is no internet access, and hence, no easy way to get ahold of make; it's given me a bad habit of just waiting a build.bash script to do what make does most of the time. I haven't really found myself missing it that much.
If you can install bash on your airgapped dev box, why wouldn't you install make on it? Make is part of the core dev environment on just about every disto under the sun.
I am confused, because this means that you won't be able to install anything. No compiler, no 3rd party libraries and no text editor that isn't preinstalled
It's 80% of what you want and it's installed everywhere.
You could go for something closer to exactly what you want, but now you've got an extra set up step for devs and something else for people to learn if they want to change it.
I would say if you're looking for cli args then you shouldn't be using any wrapper like make at all. Just call the underlying tool directly. Make is for doing big high level things in the standard way, nowadays quite often in CI pipelines.
Yep, that's how I used it on the job before. "make test" would run tests locally and in CI pipeline, keeping the CI file refreshingly short at that point.
you don't do it naked, you write and use wrapper scripts to make it ergonomic