Make shares a fundamental property with C and C++: they are not meant to be simple; they are meant to be powerful! In the purest Unix tradition, Make was desig

Make shares a fundamental property with C and C++: they are not meant to be simple; they are meant to be powerful! In the purest Unix tradition, Make was designed to be tool-agnostic: you can choose which editor to code in, which (if any) preprocessor to use, which compiler and which linker to invoke and with which arguments, and what else to do aside. And, all of this is controlled by a bunch of text files, which means grep and sed are your friends when you want to change a linker option for several projects. Make comes from a philosophy which is the opposite of the IDE's ground. Not that the IDE concept is wrong per se, but if you are only used to have the same monolithic behemoth from code typing to binary output, your critics of make sound the same as an industrial fast food cook complaining that artisan patisserie is too complex.