
ProPublica Illinois Uses GNU Make to Load 1.4GB of Data Every Day – ProPublica - plcancel
https://www.propublica.org/nerds/gnu-make-illinois-campaign-finance-data-david-eads-propublica-illinois
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dventimi
I once replaced a Hadoop ETL process that took several hours with a GNU Make
ETL process that took several tens of minutes and loaded well more than 1.4GB
of data, at a company that shall not be named. Its Java developers working on
Windows machines blinked uncomprehendingly at it and muttered, "This is not
enterprise." I quit within the month.

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thecureforzits
GNU Make's documentation is actually excellent. It's dense, but that is only
because there is a lot to cover.

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colejohnson66
While the autotools system is _very_ powerful, I think people’s problem with
it (`make`) is its syntax. `configure` is usually a bash script, but `make`
isn’t. It’s pretty unintuitive to a newbie. It _looks_ like a script, but it’s
_kindof not._ The lack of arrays is a weird choice (AFAIK _everything_ is a
string) that requires one to use quotes in a lot of places so “array-like”
“functions” work correctly.

When I was learning C++ a bit ago, I _tried_ to write basic `Makefile` files,
but switched to CMake. There is the disadvantage of practically every Unix-
like OS having `make`, but not always CMake, but I found the trade off worth
it for one-off projects

I am partial to Rust over C/C++ here, but I do like Rust’s method of a simple
`cargo build`, but with the ability to write a program (`build.rs`) for non-
Rust parts.

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nix23
Just a question:

Is i really a good idea to download voting data over a unencrypted ftp?

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joezydeco
RTFA. It's campaign finance data. Contributions and spending, which is
publicly available information. ProPublica is a watchdog group.

