"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."
– John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail
I have an alternate theory: about 10% of developers can actually start something from scratch because they truly understand how things work (not that they always do it, but they could if needed). Another 40% can get the daily job done by copying and pasting code from local sources, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or an LLM—while kinda knowing what’s going on. That leaves 50% who don’t really know much beyond a few LeetCode puzzles and have no real grasp of what they’re copying and pasting.
Given that distribution, I’d guess that well over 50% of Makefiles are just random chunks of copied and pasted code that kinda work. If they’re lifted from something that already works, job done—next ticket.
I’m not blaming the tools themselves. Makefiles are well-known and not too verbose for smaller projects. They can be a bad choice for a 10,000-file monster—though I’ve seen some cleanly written Makefiles even for huge projects. Personally, it wouldn’t be my first choice. That said, I like Makefiles and have been using them on and off for at least 30 years.
At my work I've noticed another contributing factor: tools/systems that devs need to interact with at some point, but otherwise provide little perceived value to learn day-to-day.
Example is build system and CI configuration. We absolutely need these but devs don't think they should be expected to deal with them day to day. CI is perceived as a system that should be "set and forget", like yeah we need it but really I have to learn all this just to build the app? Devs expect it to "just work" and if there are complexities then another team (AKA my role) deals with that. As a result, any time devs interact with the system, there's a high motivation to copy from the last working setup and move on with their day to the "real" work.
The best solution I see is meet the devs halfway. Provide them with tooling that is appropriate simple/complex for the task, provide documentation, minimise belief in "magic". Tools like Make kinda fail here because they are too complex and black-box-like.
Make and Makefiles are incredibly simple when they are not autogenerated by autoconf. If they are generated by autoconf, don’t modify them, they are a build artifact. But also, ditch autoconf if you can.
In the broader sense: yes this effect is very real. You can fall to it or you can exploit it. How I exploit it: write a bit of code (or copy/paste it from somewhere). Use it in a project. Refine as needed. When starting the next project, copy that bit of code in. Modify for the second project. See if changes can be backported to the original project. Once both are running and are in sync, extract the bit of code and make it into a library. Sometimes this takes more projects to distill the thing into what a library should be. In the best case, open source the library so others can use it.
I think Makefile is maybe the wrong analogy - the problem with most people and makefiles is they write so few of them, the general idea of what make does is at hand, but the muscle memory of how to do it from scratch is not.
But, point taken - I've seen so much code copy-pasta'd from the web, there will be like a bunch of dead stuff in it that's actually not used. A good practice here is to keep deleting stuff until you break it, then put whatever that was back... And delete as much as possible - certainly everything you're not using at the moment.
myhf ·5 days ago
– John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law
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mianos ·5 days ago
Given that distribution, I’d guess that well over 50% of Makefiles are just random chunks of copied and pasted code that kinda work. If they’re lifted from something that already works, job done—next ticket.
I’m not blaming the tools themselves. Makefiles are well-known and not too verbose for smaller projects. They can be a bad choice for a 10,000-file monster—though I’ve seen some cleanly written Makefiles even for huge projects. Personally, it wouldn’t be my first choice. That said, I like Makefiles and have been using them on and off for at least 30 years.
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mcdeltat ·5 days ago
Example is build system and CI configuration. We absolutely need these but devs don't think they should be expected to deal with them day to day. CI is perceived as a system that should be "set and forget", like yeah we need it but really I have to learn all this just to build the app? Devs expect it to "just work" and if there are complexities then another team (AKA my role) deals with that. As a result, any time devs interact with the system, there's a high motivation to copy from the last working setup and move on with their day to the "real" work.
The best solution I see is meet the devs halfway. Provide them with tooling that is appropriate simple/complex for the task, provide documentation, minimise belief in "magic". Tools like Make kinda fail here because they are too complex and black-box-like.
Show replies
IgorPartola ·4 days ago
In the broader sense: yes this effect is very real. You can fall to it or you can exploit it. How I exploit it: write a bit of code (or copy/paste it from somewhere). Use it in a project. Refine as needed. When starting the next project, copy that bit of code in. Modify for the second project. See if changes can be backported to the original project. Once both are running and are in sync, extract the bit of code and make it into a library. Sometimes this takes more projects to distill the thing into what a library should be. In the best case, open source the library so others can use it.
Show replies
mattbillenstein ·5 days ago
But, point taken - I've seen so much code copy-pasta'd from the web, there will be like a bunch of dead stuff in it that's actually not used. A good practice here is to keep deleting stuff until you break it, then put whatever that was back... And delete as much as possible - certainly everything you're not using at the moment.
Show replies