Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

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.

> 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.

Small nuance: I think people often don’t know because they don’t have the time to figure it out. There are only so many battles you can fight during a day. For example if I’m a C++ programmer working on a ticket, how many layers of the stack should I know? For example, should I know how the CPU registers are called? And what should an AI researcher working always in Jupyter know? I completely encourage anyone to learn as much about the tools and stack as possible, but there is only so much time.

We can’t really call the field engineering if this is the standard. A fundamental understanding of what one’s code actually makes the machine do is necessary to write quality code regardless of how high up the abstraction stack it is

Steam engines predate the understanding of not just the crystalline structure of steel but even the basics of thermodynamics by quite a few decades.

Yes and they’re far less efficient and require far more maintenance than an equivalent electric or even diesel engine, where equivalent power is even possible

Steam engines currently power most of the world's electrical grid. The main reason for this is that, completely contrary to what you said, they are more efficient and more reliable than diesel engines. (Electric motors of course are not a heat engine at all and so are not comparable.)

Steam engines used to be very inefficient, in part because the underlying thermodynamic principles were not understood, but also because learning to build safe ones (largely a question of metallurgy) took a long time. Does that mean that designing them before those principles were known was "not engineering"? That seems like obvious nonsense to me.

Steam engines are thoroughly obsolete in the developed world where there are natural gas pipeline networks.

People quit building coal burning power plants in North America at the same time they quit burning nuclear power plants for the same reason. The power density difference between gas turbines and steam turbines is enough that the capital cost difference is huge. It would be hard to afford steam turbines if the heat was free.

Granted people have been building pulverized coal burning power plants in places like China where they'd have to run efficient power plants on super-expensive LNG. They thought in the 1970s it might be cheaper to gasify coal and burn it in a gas turbine but it's one of those technologies that "just doesn't work".

Nuclear isn't going to be affordable unless they can perfect something like

https://www.powermag.com/what-are-supercritical-co2-power-cy...

If you count the cost of the steam turbine plus the steam generators plus the civil works to enclose those, nuclear just can't be competitive.