An opinionated approach to GNU Make
The HN and the blogosphere generally are replete with unconvincing "you're doing it wrong" posts.  This is one. I use make (and have used it off and on for a long long time: since the late 80s).  I don't do any of these things. If the author is going to make a convincing case his way is "right" and other ways are "wrong", it's incumbent upon him to clearly state what failures I will avoid.  Then I can evaluate how often I encounter them, and decide how important this advice is.  As stated, it doesn't seem very important.<p>I frequently run into similar situations with more junior engineers at work.  One will insist on dogmatically adopting some "best" practice advocated somewhere, and when I ask what failures or bad situations we'll avoid, or what good situations we'll encourage, they can't answer.  In their minds, someone (outside our team or the company) said it's better and so it must be.<p>I think it's important to avoid invoking incantations, and to understand the reasons for each choice you make.  In this article, I don't see that.