I’ve found myself writing a fair number of Makefiles in the last few weeks: In part because it was a tool, hell a class of tools, that I didn’t really understand and I’m a big sucker for learning new things, and in part because I had a lot of build process-related tasks to automate. But I think my interest is a bit deeper than that.
Make and related tools provide a good metaphor for thinking about certain kinds of tasks and processes. Build systems are less about making something more efficient (though often it does do that,) and more about making processes reproducible and consistent. In some respects I think it’s appropriate to think of build tools as.
I’ve written here before about the merits of /technical-writing/compilation for documentation, and I think that still holds true: build processes add necessary procedural structure. Indirectly, having formalized build process, also makes it very easy to extend and develop processes as needs change. There’s some up-front work, but it nearly always pays off.
While I want to avoid thinking that everything is a Makefile-shaped nail, I think it’s also probably true that there are a lot of common tasks in general purpose computing that are make shaped: format conversion, extracting and importing data, typesetting (and all sorts of publication related tasks,) archiving, system configuration, etc. Perhaps, more generic build tools need to be part of basic computer literacy. That’s another topic for a much larger discussion.
Finally, I want to raise (or re-raise) the question, that another function of build systems is reduce friction on common tasks and increase the likelihood that tasks will get done, and that people will need less technical background to do fundamentally mundane tasks. Build systems are absolutely essential for producing output from any really complex process because it’s hard to reliably produce builds without them; for less complex processes they’re essential because no one (or fewer people) do those tasks without some kind of support.
Rough thoughts as always.