I like the idea of Make, but it's far too hacky. Even using it for a static blog site (turning foo.md -> foo.html, which is pretty close to the usual foo.c -> f

I like the idea of Make, but it's far too hacky. Even using it for a static blog site (turning foo.md -> foo.html, which is pretty close to the usual foo.c -> foo.o examples) ended up with recursive invocations, rule-creation macros, double-escaped sigils, eval, etc. There are a bunch of lightweight alternatives to Make out there (I hear Ninja is pretty good). My personal preference is Nix these days (although that's quite heavyweight).