> I've been always wondering why do we even need specialized build tools and why does the community around every new programming language or framework feel obli

> I've been always wondering why do we even need specialized build tools and why does the community around every new programming language or framework feel obliged to invent their own, implemented in their native language. Why can't we just write a script in Python or any other scripting language which would fetch the deps, invoke the compilers, run the tests and spit out the package? Not-invented-here and developers want to do stupid things in build systems. Not normally intentionally or maliciously, it's just that if you can do something and the build system does not complain about it, it's in. Then you get 'build systems a la carte' - that are designed based on rigor and experience such as Bazel and buck2 and you start seeing that you can no longer do those things for very good reasons such as guaranteed reproducibility and hermetic builds. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/03/build-systems.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...