Some Data Should Be Code
17 hours ago
- Makefiles are often used as ad-hoc build systems for small projects, but their pattern matching and abstraction capabilities are limited.
- For complex tasks, users resort to generating Makefiles with scripts since Make doesn't scale well, highlighting the need for code-driven build graphs.
- Tools like doit, AWS CDK, and potential Python-based alternatives for CI systems demonstrate the benefits of using code to generate configuration files instead of hand-writing static data formats.
- Static data formats are often seen as simpler, but they lack the flexibility, abstraction, and type safety that code provides when used to emit data.