Are the critiques in "All the things I hate about Python" valid?

[bartc]

On 18/02/2018 01:39, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 12:31 PM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>> On 18/02/2018 00:45, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 11:13 AM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> It's text, but it is an intermediate or "object" file. It's not doing
>>> pointless stuff; it's coping with the myriad platforms and variants
>>> that Python has support for.
>>
>>
>> It could well do all that. But it surely cannot need 18,000 lines' worth to
>> do it; that much should be obvious to anyone. And in fact, for building with
>> MS's Visual Studio, it doesn't use that file at all, but something smaller.
>> (Although the MS build adds its own complexities.)
> 
> You're arguing against a strawman, and you know it. Either that, or
> you have a fundamental misunderstanding of "intermediate files", in
> which case I recommend you spend some time with a web search engine.
> 
> I'm done.

Then you have your head in the sand. Whether you are looking at the 
18000-line file, or the 5000-line one, you should be asking yourself 
what on earth any of that gobbledygook has to do with compiling CPython?

What files does it generate or modify, if any; what is the end result of it?

According to the diagram here: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configure_script, the eventual output is a 
config.h file, and a makefile. Hey, why don't they just provide those 
files?! (Sometimes projects do just that, provide a range of makefiles 
for example.)

Then it just needs 'make', which is a tool that comes with the C 
compiler that is needed anyway.

(However, I don't even use 'make'; look at the arrow between the 'make' 
process and the executable: implied here are invocations of tools such 
as compilers and linkers. This is where I usually work. This is all that 
is usually needed.)

-- 
bartc