[TUHS] Another "craft" discussion topic - mindless tool proliferation

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 06:01:49PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> On Sep 21, 2017, at 5:50 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Oh, brother.  Like the BSD Makefile crap.
> 
> pmake, from 4.3BSD, was not evil.  

Lots of stuff is not evil.  BitKeeper, my baby, is pretty sweet.  But you
know what?  Everyone uses Git or SVN.  Being not evil isn't enough.

> I really like mk.  8ed was where it first rolled out?  I remember reading about it in the 10ed books.  It's a joy to use in Plan 9.

I like make.  I carried around the source to a Sys III make (I think) because
it had enough in it that it was useful and didn't have all the crud that
is in GNU make.

I do wish that some simple make had stuffed a scripting language in there.
Anything, tcl, lua, even (horrors, can't believe I'm saying this) a little
lisp.  Or ideally a built in shell compat language.  All those backslashes
to make shell scripts work get old.