Editing Make (software) (section)

==Origin== 

[[Stuart Feldman]] created Make while at [[Bell Labs]]. An early version was completed in April 1976.<ref name="v7-version">{{cite web|url=http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7%2Fusr%2Fsrc%2Fcmd%2Fmake%2Fident.c|archive-url=https://archive.today/20130901165315/http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7%2Fusr%2Fsrc%2Fcmd%2Fmake%2Fident.c|url-status=dead|title=V7/usr/src/cmd/make/ident.c|date=1 September 2013|archive-date=1 September 2013|website=tuhs.org|access-date=18 March 2018}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Feldman|first1=S. I.|title=Make --- A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs|journal=Software: Practice and Experience|date=April 1979|volume=9|issue=4|pages=255–265|doi=10.1002/spe.4380090402|citeseerx=10.1.1.39.7058|s2cid=33059412}}</ref><ref name=razzveer/> Feldman received the 2003 [[ACM Software System Award]] for authoring Make.<ref>{{Cite book|pages=94|title=Practical Development Environments|author=Matthew Doar|isbn=978-0-596-00796-6|year=2005|publisher=[[O'Reilly Media]]}}</ref> 

Feldman describes the inspiration to write Make as arising from a coworker's frustration with the available tooling of the time:

{{blockquote|Make originated with a visit from [[Stephen C. Johnson|Steve Johnson]] (author of yacc, etc.), storming into my office, cursing the Fates that had caused him to waste a morning debugging a correct program (bug had been fixed, file hadn't been compiled, {{code|cc *.o}} was therefore unaffected). As I had spent a part of the previous evening coping with the same disaster on a project I was working on, the idea of a tool to solve it came up. It began with an elaborate idea of a dependency analyzer, boiled down to something much simpler, and turned into Make that weekend. Use of tools that were still wet was part of the culture. Makefiles were text files, not magically encoded binaries, because that was the [[Unix philosophy|Unix ethos]]: printable, debuggable, understandable stuff.|Stuart Feldman|''[[The Art of Unix Programming]]'', [[Eric S. Raymond]] 2003}}

Before Make, building on Unix mostly consisted of [[shell script]]s written for each program's codebase. Make's dependency ordering and out-of-date checking makes the build process more robust and more efficient. The makefile allowed for better organization of build logic and often fewer build files.

Make is widely used in part due to its early inclusion in [[Unix]], starting with [[PWB/UNIX]] 1.0, which featured a variety of software development tools.<ref name=razzveer>{{cite journal |last1=Thompson |first1=T. J. |title=Designer's Workbench: Providing a Production Environment |journal=Bell System Technical Journal |date=November 1980 |volume=59 |issue=9 |pages=1811–1825 |doi=10.1002/j.1538-7305.1980.tb03063.x|s2cid=27213583 |quote=In the general maintenance of DWB, we have used the Source Code Control System and make utility provided by the PWB/UNIX* interactive operating system.}}</ref>