[davisp]

From the article:

That means it's totally normal to ship all kinds of really crazy looking stuff, and so when someone noticed that and decided to use that as their mechanism for extracting some badness from a so-called "test file" that was actually laden with their binary code, is it so surprising that it happened? To me, it seems inevitable.

Yeah, no. The author is well aware of how and why autotools are not awesome but also with the background of why they exist.

A better argument can be made that the act of compiling a binary / obfuscating / minifying code instead of interpreting code directly is the fault.

I can’t decide if you’ve never worked in systems software or trying to be hyperbolic. Given that it’s HN I’ll assume the best. But who do you think would do the interpreting? The priests at Delphi?