I also use "printf debugging"; I have to. The worst problem I had, though, was REALLY annoying; I was getting an inscrutable error in the middle of a function,

I also use "printf debugging"; I have to. The worst problem I had, though, was REALLY annoying; I was getting an inscrutable error in the middle of a function, and I could delete large parts of the code to get the error to go away, but putting ANY of the code back brought the error back -- it didn't matter which parts I put back. It turned out that git had changed LF to CRLF in the file, and some end-of-line character was screwing up the spacing. Tweaking .gitattributes and fixing the files made everything work. I SO hate significant white-space. I never really forgave Python for that "feature" either. But I could totally get behind Lua for the logic. :) Actually, if it were my job, I would use LuaJIT to write a make replacement; the dependencies could all be specified in tables or extended strings, and any more complicated logic could be explicitly outside of the "rules". >but the problem is, the _rest_ of the build, which more people interact with on a daily basis, gets more complex when that happens I think a good design would NOT have that problem. You could have it say "these files get built by default rules" separately from "these rules trigger this bit of Lua code, which can spit out warnings, add dependencies dynamically (oh wouldn't THAT be nice!), or do this other bit of complicated build processing that doesn't fit well into the rule-based system". If you're doing it in Makefiles, then yes, you could make everything more complicated that way. But I think a fresh design could really do a good job in killing make. I'm just so busy with other things right now, though... Another reason I would STRONGLY choose Lua over any other scripting system is that the entire tool can embed Lua trivially, while Python or Ruby or Perl would each bring an entire ecosystem with it. You can have a dozen different Lua installs on your system without requiring a separate infrastructure for managing Lua installs.