Well, I'd be talking about things like "I'd like it to be an error if a make rule claims to make a certain dependency and it fails to do so.", like I said in th

Well, I'd be talking about things like "I'd like it to be an error if a make rule claims to make a certain dependency and it fails to do so.", like I said in the next sentence. While we're at it, undefined variables should be errors, not turned into empty strings, and like I said, were I working with it routinely I'm sure I could come up with more. There's a lot more to make than just its shell invocations. Furthermore, embedding shell's default error handling behavior into make isn't exactly a comforting thing. It's way quirkier than a lot of people understand, and unfortunately it all comes to the surface when people start using make. "It stops at a non-zero exit code!" is, unfortunately, far, far from the simple thing it sounds like. And encountering the "errors? pshaw, whatever" attitude in multiple languages is precisely why I know it's such a bad idea. Were it just Perl or something, I wouldn't be able to tell if it's a bad idea or if Perl is just a bad implementation, but after the decades I've been using these languages, I've come to the conclusion it's just a bad idea everywhere I encounter it.