"The Association for Computing Machinery announced that it has recognized Dr. Stuart I. Feldman for creating a seminal piece of software engineering known as Make. Almost every software developer in the world has used Make, or one of its descendants, as a tool for maintaining computer software. Dr. Feldman will receive the 2003 ACM Software System Award."
Just software developers? In TPoSaNA we recommend "make" as the perfect tool for system administrators too. Heck, every Unix machine I administer has a file called /etc/Makefile which automates all the common processes required to run that machine. Most of my work can be done by editing the right file followed by a quick "cd /etc && make" to push through any changes.
Past awardees are listed here. It's quite interesting if you look at the years. In 1991 when they gave the award to the creators of TCP/IP I wonder if they had any idea how much of a future it had!
you have any examples of your sysadmin makefiles?
I use makefiles also but more for the use of editing configuration files on a master server and then pushing the changes to the clients.
lex