The Joys Of Data-Driven Programming

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 9:53 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some other examples:
> 1.
> Aren’t makefiles data-driven? And if so should not much more declarative
> attempts like jam have been correspondingly more successful?
> https://www.perforce.com/resources/documentation/jam
>
> [Personally Ive always believed that jam is better than make and is less used
> for entirely historical reasons; something like half the world eoling with crlf
> and half with lf.  But maybe make is really a better design because more imperative?]

The issues with makefiles are mainly to do with metaprogramming (plus
a few specific issues with the format itself, which don't apply to the
more general concept). There's a ton of magic to cope with makefiles
that try to rebuild themselves, plus all the extra tooling around the
outside (configure scripts etc), to try to move to a meta-level above
the makefile and thus enable metaprogramming of makefile contents.

ChrisA