To be fair, YAML 1.2 does not suffer from the "Norway Problem", but YAML is still a rather complex format. I feel like the Makefile syntax has some pesky warts

To be fair, YAML 1.2 does not suffer from the "Norway Problem", but YAML is still a rather complex format. I feel like the Makefile syntax has some pesky warts, like not breaking when there are spaces in filenames, requiring tabs[1], the ceremony around PHONY targets... If you take the legacy stuff out of make, [1] Apparently it can be fixed with a complex .RECIPEPREFIX incantation which behaves differently in different versions of GNU make, and was conveniently added just one minor version after Apple has graciously decided to stop updating all their GNU software versions. Redo, ninja and tup seems like trying to do that, with their own twists, but none of them really managed to nudge make out;