[Ericson2314]

This makes me sad.

You hopefully have tried out many other build systems by now, been frusted with all of them, and only then made your own. And with all that experience with the status quo, marketing should be easy.

If you haven't done that, this project is a net-negative on the world, because the proliferation of build systems exacerbates Conway's law and balkanizes our software commons.

NIH in FOSS is not free.

[csdigi]

I am not an author, but was around when we decided to create Please in 2015.

When we created Please we were currently using Buck from Facebook. As has been covered elsewhere at the time it had some limitations which meant that it was getting more and more expensive to workaround (no multiple outs from rules so doing things like sourcemaps was hard etc). We had previously migrated from a set of disparate build tools (Gradle, Gulp etc) to Buck after evaluating it against Pants (we actually trialled our repo with both).

We all had experience with Blaze (Bazel did not exist in 2014/2015) and wanted to get closer to the experience we had in Google, hence the final decision to build our own. At the time we rolled it out we had full Buck compatibility (and actually most of our engineers did not notice initially). Once we were happy it worked, we migrated in full to Please.

Overall it allowed us to provide much better tooling for our developers (queries on the build graph for smaller CI/CD footprints, coverage in all languages, and for rules that can output multiple languages (like protocol buffers) we only build variants in the requested languages rather than all languages).

If Bazel had been open-sourced and easy to extend at the time we would certainly have looked to adopt and improve it (as we did with Buck at the time). But by the time they open-sourced it the two system had diverged in their approach and use cases.

I (obviously somewhat biased) think having multiple principled build systems which prioritise the needs of different communities is good for the ecosystem overall (and allows the sharing of good ideas such as the Remote Execution Interface).

[rhencke]

Marketing can be hard not because you don't have something worth marketing, but because marketing is a skill-set largely orthogonal to software development.

[wpietri]

That's only true if you define software development in a pretty particular way.

For me, writing code is a way of solving problems for people. That involves listening to them to see how I can help. Then collaborating with them to iteratively make something that fits their needs. Which includes helping them adopt it and get productive with it. To me, all of that is part of software development.

And that's most of the "marketing" that's needed for a free, open-source tool. When that's lacking, I have to wonder to what extent the tool was actually made to solve somebody's problems. As opposed to being created because the developer was excited to build a thing as a technical exercise. Either path is fine, of course, but it's a mistake to confuse the two.

[rhencke]

To me, writing code is very much the same way - it is a human endeavor. But, over the years, I have learned that just not all people are the same way, and that's okay, too.

Growing up, one of the jobs I took was as a system's administrator at the same company my father worked at. It was a small company, maybe six people or so, doing contract work for aerospace. One of the older men who worked there held his Ph. D. in aerospace engineering. He was kind, warm and brilliant... but he struggled with things like sending coherent emails to clients. But that was okay - other people were able to take that on.

[Ericson2314]

That's totally fair. But...going on a hunch, such a person would also make a crude 90s-style website.

Whoever made this clearly knows about slick presentation --- they've got all those colors and shapes pizzas --- so they either capable with slick communications, or work with someone who is. My patience for lack of explanation is therefore a lot thinner.

[Ericson2314]

I'm talking about "marketting" to other software developers, not to non-software developers. Communication with people like oneself is a core skill, not a specialized trade.

This isn't a paid product, after all.

(I'm also a traditionalist that thinks writing good prose and writing good programs are related skills.)

[PedroBatista]

> marketing should be easy

I’m sorry, what?!

Do you realize the “sell something to people” industry has been at least as big as the tech industry for many decades and is the one growing faster and faster?

Also marketing has historically been a problem for people who make stuff.

Also, better have the Balkans of software than the USSR of mega corps.