[throwaway894345]

> I agree with the observation. But the alternatives are grossly over-engineered or a case study in NIH. I'm sticking with Makefiles until someone can present something better.

I agree that they are complex beasts, but that complexity is incidental, not essential (some might argue "a lack of engineering" rather than "overengineered"). The documentation for these tools is also pretty atrocious on average. However, I don't think they're NIH insofar as their direct ancestor (Blaze) was never publicly available and Bazel didn't exist when those original Googler pilgrims brought their build-system ideas to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. But nevertheless, there are half a dozen shitty tools instead of one decent tool. Worse, they're pretty much all designed for use in large organizations' monorepos--organizations who can employ people who are specialists in operating/maintaining these tools.

> I don't think Nix improves anything when you are stuck writing a weird javascript derivative. This comes from a packager writing bash for a living.

The improvements are certainly not uniformly distributed, nor are they sufficient to really justify its mainstream use, IMHO. :)