"Makefiles are machine-readable documentation ... " Yes it is machine readable but how about us humans? Makefiles are ugly and when working on someone else's p

"Makefiles are machine-readable documentation ... " Yes it is machine readable but how about us humans? Makefiles are ugly and when working on someone else's project it is very hard to reverse engineer the build system. Build systems are themselves software projects and we need better tools to develop and maintain them. SCons was a promising project at one point, it improved things by capturing the build system in Python classes. I thought things would be more maintainable and readable. However for me it wasn't a well design, it obscures build system development with mixed declarative and iterative programming. Makefiles are the defacto standard today, but they're no where near beautiful, or maintainable, or readable. There are also variations of it such as gmake, imake, and so on, who only add their own quirks without solving the real problems.