No, other tools do not suffer from what makes make complex. Make is "hard" because of a few things: 1. The syntax is very complex 2. It's just a wrappe

No, other tools do not suffer from what makes make complex. Make is "hard" because of a few things: 1. The syntax is very complex 2. It's just a wrapper around shell command execution 3. There's no single standard everyone fully implements If I implemented a makefile then I'd have to make sure it's compatible with MacOS and GNU Make. The syntax for make files and target deps are also very complex "Do I want to use % or $ or @?" Make also implements very few pieces of functionality. It forks out SHELL for most things and because of this you need to have everything your makefile is using installed on your system. If you have a makefile, invariably, someone implements some tool that's super helpful and works.... until it doesn't. It depends on some system configuration or utility that is no longer a dep of something you've manually installed and the makefile breaks. If you use containers for all of your functionality this is no longer an issue because you can vendor base layers of OSs/images and make sure they don't break. You can also test these changes, that could be breaking, without rolling out to other developers. I cannot test if my Makefile will run on a developer's mac if I don't have a mac myself and even then it's a crap shoot (do they have homebrew? is their PATH correct? etc).