| Before a couple of years ago, I had never written a Makefile in my life. I ended up using Make after experiencing web project builder merry-go-round du jour of Grunt, Gulp, npm/yarn scripts, WebPack, etc. Of course I had read all of the Make FUD… but like almost all things in computing (Vim vs. Emacs, tabs vs. spaces, Mac vs. Windows) you can't take it too seriously. For me, similarly to when I went through several editors before I discovered Vim, Make has been around long enough and people have used it to address the hairiest build/dependency issues that many of the new tools have yet to address. Let me address a few common issues. IMHO the syntax isn't that bad. Like almost any programming language, you can write a clean, well-documented Makefile following best practices or you can slap something together with no planning and have an indecipherable page of junk. And like many languages, many folks never learn to write Makefiles properly. I get it—most Makefiles in the wild are close to unreadable and are mostly undocumented. And because Make has been around since the '70s, there's lots of hard-earned wisdom in blog posts and forums readily available going back decades. O’Reilly's book "Managing Projects with GNU Make" (3rd edition) does a great job at getting someone up and running with Make. And the online documentation [1] is also quite good. But the most important thing is I'm much more productive using Make instead of messing around with the various JavaScript build tools and their plugins. It's easy to integrate JavaScript, command line, Ruby, etc. tools with Make to get my projects built, linted, tested, packaged and deployed. And having native support for Make in Vim/Neovim [2] is just the cherry on top. And it's still under active development [3] with bug fixes and new features. Perhaps the best thing about Make: there's no dependency graph/build web project issue it can't handle. Writing clean, readable and well-documented may take a little more effort but it's worth it IMHO. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ [2]: https://vimways.org/2018/runtime-hackery/ [3]: https://lwn.net/Articles/913253/ |