I wrote 3 substantial GNU makefiles from scratch and regretted it largely because it lacks this split -- it has a very tortured way of doing build "

I wrote 3 substantial GNU makefiles from scratch and regretted it largely because it lacks this split -- it has a very tortured way of doing build "metaprogramming". GNU make definitely still has a lot of rough edges, but parts of your comment seems as though you're making claims about it that haven't been true in a decade or more. For one, you don't need to "write a Lisp in Make", it has Guile built-in now (but probably didn't when you were actively using it): https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Guile-Example.html#Guile-Example https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Guile-Exa... There's quite a few small things about modern GNU make that make it easier to use for meta-programming than it was even just a decade ago. It still has a lot of rough edges that I wish it didn't have though.