As noted in many of the comments, make sucks, and the article is not promoting make per se. But make seems to be the topic of conversation, so: To me, make is

As noted in many of the comments, make sucks, and the article is not promoting make per se. But make seems to be the topic of conversation, so: To me, make is a cruddy low-level declarative language that gets abused as a pseudo-imperative language, compounding the problem. Phony targets like "make <verb>" break the paradigm, because <verb> is not an artefact that can be tested for up-to-date-ness. But one advantage of make that I'm seeing underrepresented in the comments is its ubiquity. If I just want to try your project, and I need to build your project to try it, and your project is using the cool new SchnauzerBuild[1] tool, and there's no SchnauzerBuild package for my OS, I have to go install that from source... which might have its own build dependencies... ok, your project looks kind of cool but I have better things to do than this. I think it's great when build tools are able to write out a Makefile or sh[2] script that just builds everything, and when projects ship with that pregenerated. (and remember to keep it updated) [1] fictional [2] another technology that sucks but is ubiquitous