Lots of things optimize for terseness. Assembly, arithmetic/algebra, and any kind of shorthand in any kind of trade. That’s because the shorthand is usually easy enough to learn, and then provides value going forward.
You are perfectly capable of parsing “3+2*4”, I don’t have to always write it as “MULTIPLY 2 BY 4, ADD 3”. Similarly you would get pretty mad if instead of “ld” or “lda” you’d have to type “load register” or “load accumulator” each time. Those concepts are trivial once you understood them, you don’t need a constant reminder of what they expand to.
Doing so might get slightly more people to “start using the thing” in the very first step, but might also let many people look for a more terse alternative. And we don’t have to cater to any person who is really unwilling to learn.
Overall I find it hard to buy that you actually had much trouble with $< and $@, at least in a way that you couldn’t have cleared up for yourself about 20 times in the time it took you to write out your comments.
I was hoping my introduction to Makefiles would be useful. If it was not, maybe I’m a bad educator after all.
You are perfectly capable of parsing “3+2*4”, I don’t have to always write it as “MULTIPLY 2 BY 4, ADD 3”. Similarly you would get pretty mad if instead of “ld” or “lda” you’d have to type “load register” or “load accumulator” each time. Those concepts are trivial once you understood them, you don’t need a constant reminder of what they expand to.
Doing so might get slightly more people to “start using the thing” in the very first step, but might also let many people look for a more terse alternative. And we don’t have to cater to any person who is really unwilling to learn.
Overall I find it hard to buy that you actually had much trouble with $< and $@, at least in a way that you couldn’t have cleared up for yourself about 20 times in the time it took you to write out your comments.
I was hoping my introduction to Makefiles would be useful. If it was not, maybe I’m a bad educator after all.