3 ms·

Systems besides make are used because they offer advantages make doesn't

• Kalium 8y ago
  For many of those systems, the biggest advantage is often that tasks are written in the language of the application. A lot of the Rake tasks I've encountered in my career would have been easier to write in bash. Not a majority, but a sizable minority. I suspect that in many cases, the gain was that the authors were more comfortable in Ruby than in bash.
  • eropple 8y ago
    I'm pretty comfortable in both, but I'll pretty regularly use Ruby via Pry for stuff I know I can do in bash. It's easier to write, much much much easier to write correctly, and it presents a unified interface to other developers.
  • usrusr 8y ago
    Language specific build tools will usually behave predictably across all development platforms supported by the language. Once you start building on a third party, developer experience will be bounded by the quality of platform support of that third party. You don't want to send everybody off on a hunt for the right version of Python unless you are Python. (Just picking Python as an example because of the recent xkcd. The same is true for everything else, e.g. a Windows computer will rarely contain exactly one make.exe, it's usually either none or a whole bunch of them)