Snakemake is great, but it does feel like just a slightly more modern Make. I am pretty excited about research projects that tie the recipe and the computation

Snakemake is great, but it does feel like just a slightly more modern Make. I am pretty excited about research projects that tie the recipe and the computation closer together so that you do not preserve just the last recipe, but the whole history of exploratory computation and analysis. E.g. mandala (https://github.com/amakelov/mandala https://github.com/amakelov/mandala), a project of a colleague of mine which is basically semantic git for your computational graph and data at the same time.