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I do not rule out that one exists, but what tool looks simpler (I wanted to say ‘nicer’, but I think we should avoid ‘it looks ugly’ arguments; I think those la

I do not rule out that one exists, but what tool looks simpler (I wanted to say ‘nicer’, but I think we should avoid ‘it looks ugly’ arguments; I think those largely are about familiarity) once you start building something from code written in multiple programming languages? And what tool is as powerful that doesn’t have the ‘problem’ that a lot of people never learn it fully? (Why would I learn make or any other tool to the full? I browse its manual so that I know what it can do, and (hopefully) remember features exist when I need them, so that I can (often temporarily) learn them then)

Groxx 3y ago
Most of Make is quite reasonable. The simple stuff is clear and effective and a lot of the foundations are good (dependency order? only redo changes? great!) It's the uncountable number of edge cases, lack of versioning/features (you can't declare what you need, you just succeed/fail/misbehave, often silently), massive massive problems dealing with entirely normal things in file paths like spaces, and more useful output than `make -d` for very common cases like "why am I rebuilding every time" / accidentally cyclic dependencies. For starters. Make does a lot right, but the amount of inconsistencies and friction to be reliable with it is truly absurd and unnecessary, and you need to go to extreme lengths to correctly handle them (e.g. cmake).