theden

>Makefiles are unreasonably effective.

I'm torn, I like Makefiles, but I've seen a lot of unreadable Makefiles with a lot of interpolation and ugly escaping, including cases where what should have been a proper shellscript (his point 25) crammed in a Makefile. I think Makefiles should be dead simple to see what a target does

Overall I agree, but IMO people ought to drop the 10k hours Gladwell term, to be frank it's bullshit.

spacetime_cmplx
After using https://github.com/casey/just in a medium sized project, I wholly recommend anyone even slightly frustrated with Makefiles to switch to this.

C++ : C :: Just : Make

More sensible defaults, fewer footguns, just as expressive (pardon the pun), but still nearly the same syntax and paradigms so you don't have to learn a completely new scripting language.

The biggest downside, however, is that it's not installed by default on many systems and it's not in the official repos of some major distros. If that's a dealbreaker, stick with Make.