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@regehr i disagree with the premise that this is bad. tools that can be used from scratch have just baked in defaults that happen to match. but defaults are subject to fashion, and as it changes, so grows the boilerplate. so you make a new tool to hide the boilerplate. will the situation ever settle?

@lritter @regehr
That's not the premise, the article literally says
"the title is “be aware,” not “beware.” The Makefile effect is not inherently bad! It’s something to be aware of when designing tools and systems"

@lritter @regehr
"suggests", not "means".
For example in the case of Make I'd argue that part of the problem is the obscure syntax. If it had more intuitive syntax people would probably still copy from other projects, but would have a better chance of understanding what it does (and maybe extend it themselves instead of looking for more snippets to copy from and permutating source until it works) without spending hours on refreshing their Make knowledge

@Doomed_Daniel @lritter @regehr Mixing two languages together is always messy. And questionable.

@regehr @lritter
Another thing this effect should teach tool authors is that they should provide good examples in their documentation that can be easily copied and adapted - which also implies that they need to be permissively licensed. I've seen projects using weird licenses for their docs and failing to make explicit exceptions for the contained code snippets..

@Doomed_Daniel @lritter let’s also bear in mind Microsoft’s device driver skeleton examples that had bugs

@regehr @lritter
or "error handling left out for brevity"...
I mean, maybe you don't need to do full error handling in *all* examples, but you should have ones that do it and are easy to find

@lritter @Doomed_Daniel strong disagree

@regehr @Doomed_Daniel we'll never run out of new tools i guess. :) and yet the old tools won't die.

@andrewrk @lritter @Doomed_Daniel potatoe