I don't know about the other two, but the recent resurgence of "make" seems to be around using it as a standard interface for running tasks. For example, "make

I don't know about the other two, but the recent resurgence of "make" seems to be around using it as a standard interface for running tasks. For example, "make build" would run build.py in a python project, webpack in a javascript project, etc. Similarly there's things that have been ad-hoc standards forever, like "make clean" to remove all build and test artifacts, or "make test" for running tests. Many of my coworkers only use it in this way and are unaware make looks at files/timestamps.