The other day I had to build a binary for a major open source project at work. The project relied on configure and make, and this had to be built on windows.
6 hours later.. the binary finally ran.
Why do things have to be this difficult?
Because those tools “configure” and “make” just do not scale well. Rather than pick a decent programming language, configure is written in shell. Why shell? Because it is the only programming language that doesn’t require an arm and a leg to install on a system. No libraries or config files… just /bin/sh.
We as programmers have let our tools rot. You either buy into a language religion or you use commercial tools (Java & Ant). Why can’t we start looking at our tools and come up with some better solutions that are cross platform?
There is too much religion in the world.