You see, the very first point of the article not only has a really weird opinion (that'd be only half bad), but but this weird opinion is being justified/defended with obviously faulty reasoning: "in the shell spaces matter, [so don't use tabs]. Instead, ask make to use > as the block character". Yeah, because ">" doesn't matter in shell, and there is absolutely no confusion possible as a result. Imagine copypasting a recipe from such a Makefile into a shell? The results will be pretty hilarious.
Which is a shame because the rest of the post is mostly reasonable: turning recipes from a collection of one-liners into an actual piece of shell script, deleting output files on build errors, using -e and -o pipefail, etc.
Oh I also disagree with the “>” thing. I just think we could have been like: “the > thing seems bad, good call on the pipefail thing. moving on…” rather than like ruin this guys day with 100+ negative comments because of the novel horror of a clickbait blog title. It’s not that big of a deal (unless you’re the guy who just got clobbered by every HN user awake on Sunday morning).
It's triggering for some people to be told that they are wrong, even if the person who said it doesn't actually know them specifically, wasn't thinking about them as individuals when they wrote the blog, and has no idea that they exist.
The idea that someone could be so presumptuous to assume that they had more make knowledge than everyone on the planet makes them very angry, because they are someone on the planet, so their first instinct is to lash out and prove that person wrong. A better instinct would be to humor the idea that the author doesn't think they know make better than anyone else in the world and isn't trying to hurt their feelings or their careers, but instead is trying to give people who don't know make as well as the author does a few tips.
edit: basically a gathering of the people who reply to things on the internet that upset them with: "That's just your opinion." No shit, buddy, I wrote it, who else's opinion would it be?
> It's triggering for some people to be told that they are wrong, even if the person who said it doesn't actually know them specifically, wasn't thinking about them as individuals when they wrote the blog, and has no idea that they exist.
...and, of course, when they're not actually wrong.
> No shit, buddy, I wrote it, who else's opinion would it be?
Okay, if OP can have an opinion that "Your Makefiles are wrong", then I can have an opinion that " Your article is wrong". Fair?
It’s an opinionated blog post about relatively minor Makefile conventions with a clickbait title, which doesn’t look obviously self-submitted.
And yet the thread is #1 and has 96 comments, of which like 92 are trashing the poor guy.
Surely there is someone more worthy of an HN gang-tackle than this? It can’t be that slow of a news day.