[maccard]

I think the thing is that most people do have make installed, and if not it's on every package manager ever. It's a language agnostic tool that can bootstrap the language/environment. For most use cases as a task runner, the differences between various flavors of make don't matter.

I agree with _everything_ else you've said though.

[woodrowbarlow]

i agree that it's common to encounter developers who already have `make` installed, and developers who feel comfortable enough to read/edit a Makefile. however, i think most of those are merely leveraging their knowledge of shell scripting rather than knowledge of Makefile language (which is similar enough to have scary pitfalls) -- so i'm not sure i agree with "language agnostic". it's an extra language. i wouldn't necessarily expect (say) a frontend developer to have `make` installed, or even be comfortable with shell syntax.

[maccard]

I think you’re right about leveraging their shell knowledge, but I think that’s the reason make works. It is just enough shell that it’s grokkable.

I think it’s fairly likely that a FE dev would have make installed, but also that it’s likely easier to install make than it is to install go or dotnet on a specific version, and then use a makefile to install the dependencies to run the backend locally.