dblotsky

Hard agree with the idea of greppability, but hard disagree about keeping names the same across boundaries.

I think the benefit of having one symbol exist in only one domain (e.g. “user_request” only showing up in the database-handling code, where it’s used 3 times, and not in the UI code, where it might’ve been used 30 times) reduces more cognitive load than is added by searching for 2 symbols instead of 1 common one.

Those all sound plausible! But...

1) I suspect GNU Make will be installed on any system where node code will run.

2) You don’t have to .PHONY anything that will never be a real file.

3) My bet is the Makefile will be shorter and clearer, but I am of course biased since I’m used to the syntax.

Is there any design decision of Make that makes it not suitable for executing programs?

The `./make` shell script kills me. Why not just use Make?

Yeah, that tradeoff between generality and correctness really seems tyrannical.

It kind of feels like the best trajectory is to start small with a general build system, and upgrade as needed? And then if you are confident the project will grow, starting with the specific build system fine too.

I am personally not convinced that any build system can be correct and general, but perhaps that’s my lack of experience speaking.

On that 30 minute note though: so, how big does the project need to be in order for Make not to be enough? And at that size, why wouldn’t the project invest the extra week it takes to get the Makefile correct?

How big does the project have to be in order for this system to have benefits over Make?

It sounds like the last point, about disobeying the rules when appropriate (my reading of it), was meant exactly to cover these corner cases.

Can this all be explained by the cost of labor being uniform (since humans are humans in all industries)?

So if one industry demands more labor, all others will feel the rising price of labor?

They inserted spaces though, between characters and words. In this problem, all spaces are removed.

You’re missing the huge “works incorrectly” space of outputs.

Facetious answer: Are there any good examples of projects using Parcel for a web app? ;)

Real answer: probably, but a ton of production code is closed-source.

But why restrict to web apps? Most influential software projects in the world use Make.