It was admittedly a decade ago at this point, but I used waf before I used CMake. The thing about CMake is that it has an ugly language, but a fairly simple mod

It was admittedly a decade ago at this point, but I used waf before I used CMake. The thing about CMake is that it has an ugly language, but a fairly simple model of the compilation process. The first week I started using CMake, I set up a project that built a program, then used that program to generate some code from an input file, then compiled that code as part of a library, then included that library as part of a larger application. I'd previously spent much longer trying to get that working in waf. I just couldn't figure out how to properly define dependency relationships for anything besides the built-in languages. It looked like it would be simple, but I could never get it to actually work (correctly handling incremental builds and parallel compilation). Waf has probably improved significantly since I last tried it, but the point of this story is that I agree with you. Learning a build system is more than just learning a language. You have to learn a data model and the functions that manipulate it. In my case, that was more difficult than learning a crufty macro language.