Plurrrr

make is a build tool that’s been around since the 1970s. It was originally designed for automating the building of C programs: installing dependencies, running tests, and compiling binaries.

These days, web projects involve many of the same steps: installing node_modules, running linters and tests, starting dev servers, and compiling files with esbuild or Rollup.

The default choice for automating these steps is often npm/yarn scripts: little shell commands written into your project’s package.json file. More complex projects sometimes evolve into using tools like Gulp/Grunt, or even full-blown Docker builds.

But I find make often fills many of the same needs without as much fuss.

Despite being primarily a Text User Interface (TUI) program, Vim is quite complex and has literally thousands of commands. One does not have to know all of them to be a productive Vim user.

While most programmers are seemingly eager to write new code, few are eager to refactor. In this blog post, I’ll briefly discuss a few salient reasons why I think some programmers appear to be less motivated to do code refactoring work.

Sharing conduit values leads to space leaks. Make sure that conduits are completely reconstructed on every call to runConduit; this implies we have to be careful not to create any (potentially large) conduit CAFs (skip to the final section “Avoiding space leaks” for some details on how to do this). Similar considerations apply to other streaming libraries and indeed any Haskell code that uses lazy data structures to drive computation.