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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

(blog.yossarian.net)
431 points thunderbong | 1 comments | 11 Jan 25 04:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.414s | source
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Scubabear68 ◴[11 Jan 25 15:49 UTC] No.42666623[source]▶
The best term for this is Cargo Cult Development. Cargo Cults arose in the Pacific during World War II, where native islanders would see miraculous planes bringing food, alcohol and goods to the islands and then vanishing into the blue. The islanders copied what they saw the soldiers doing, praying that their bamboo planes and coconut gadgets would impress the gods and restart the flow of cargo to the area.

The issue of course is the islanders did not understand the science behind planes, Wallis talkies, guns, etc.

Likewise, cargo cult devs see what is possible, but do not understand first principles, so they mimic what they see their high priests of technology doing, hoping they can copy their success.

Hence the practice of copying, pasting, trying, fiddling, googling, tugging, pulling and tweaking hoping that this time it will be just right enough to kind of work. Badly, and only with certain data on a Tuesday evening.

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cle ◴[11 Jan 25 16:27 UTC] No.42666913[source]▶
For me, there are many cases where I copy-paste stuff I've written in the past b/c some tool is a pain-in-the-ass and I can't afford the mental context switch. I usually do understand what's happening under the hood, but it's still cognitively heavy to switch into that "mode" so I avoid it when possible.

Tools that fall into this category are usually ops-y things with enormous complexity but are not "core" to the problem I'm solving, like CI/CD, k8s, Docker, etc. For Make specifically, I usually just avoid it at this point b/c I find it hard to avoid the context switch.

It has nothing to do with miraculous incantations--I know the tradeoff I'm making. But it still runs the risk of turning into the Makefile Effect.

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1. remus ◴[11 Jan 25 16:45 UTC] No.42667026[source]▶
I agree, and I think the key distinction is in understanding. In a cargo cult there's a lack of understanding, whereas I'll often copy and paste code/config I understand to get something done. Usually this is for something I don't do very often (configuring nginx, writing some slightly complicated shell script etc.) I could spend an hour reading docs and writing the thing from scratch but that's likely gonna be wasted time because there's a good chance Im not going to look at that thing again for a few years.