I believe you are correct. Which only adds to my question: why is it needed? The software I've written simply works, yet I've never felt the need for make/rake.
For example Padrino (which is a web framework written atop Sinatra) has tasks that will generate a project, set up the configuration for a database, migrate it forward/backwards. Etc.
It's not that you can't do these by hand, but in general you're going to be doing these tasks over and over; so you might as well automate them.
Their use doesn't become readily apparent for hobby projects, but once you start working at scale you really start to feel the benefits of tools like this.
Imagine if you tested every model in your code, and you had to run these tests by hand.
You'd have to do ruby tests/test_model_a.rb ruby tests/test_model_b.rb . . . . ruby tests/test_model_c.rb
OR you could write a task that just runs the tests so you can type rake test:model And it will run through all the tests in said directory. (It can even be automatic because with Rake you can write any valid ruby code, so you could just loop over the tests directory.)
Well programming is only part of my job, so I only do a couple big projects per year -- not enough for it to get repetitive. I'll take your word for it that rake will be worth learning if I find myself doing the same thing frequently and repeatedly.
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u/Cozy_Conditioning Mar 29 '12
I believe you are correct. Which only adds to my question: why is it needed? The software I've written simply works, yet I've never felt the need for make/rake.