Makefiles are excellent, but I think they're hampered a bit by their extremely terse syntax (see also: perl). I wonder if a slightly different dialect would hel

Makefiles are excellent, but I think they're hampered a bit by their extremely terse syntax (see also: perl). I wonder if a slightly different dialect would help modern users who are used to more verbose languages work with them. Off the top of my head, take this make example: %.o: %.c %.h gcc -o $@ $< mkdir $* cp $@ $* and spell it out a bit more: $MATCH$.o <- $MATCH$.c $MATCH$.h gcc -o $OUT$ $FIRST_DEPEND$ mkdir $MATCH$ cp $OUT$ $MATCH$ Obviously this needs a lot more thought than that, but I think newbies would find the 2nd format much more friendly than the first.