For my part, I find that being written well is necessary but not sufficient for readability in a Makefile. The other big one is that you need to have a strong

For my part, I find that being written well is necessary but not sufficient for readability in a Makefile. The other big one is that you need to have a strong familiarity with Make, and use it often. Familiar because there's no way a person who hasn't actually been through some form of Make documentation in detail can even guess at what things like $@, $?, and $^ do, or accurately decipher its macro replacement syntax, or any of that. And use it often because, even if you were deeply familiar with Make in the past, if you haven't touched it in a few years, you're unlikely to reliably remember it without help.