[emilis_info]

Yes, Makefile syntax gets somewhat obscure after the simplicity and power of target definitions and variables (e.g. http://mrbook.org/tutorials/make/).

Yes, Make does a poorer job at some of the tasks (although spawning a webserver process isn't one of them).

But I don't think having to write a plugin for EVERYTHING (http://gratimax.github.io/search-gulp-plugins/) is a sustainable answer.

P.S. I am sorry, I searched for "recursive makefile dependency hell", but I didn't find an explanation of what that is. It would be useful if you could provide some stories. I have been using Make only for two years, so maybe I haven't run into the exact problems yet.

[phpnode]

He's probably referring to this old article - http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf which suggests that recursive make is bad because it can cause a lot of unnecessary processing even if you only changed one or two files. I think this just comes down to how you're using make - for me recursive make works just fine because I tend to run the specific target I need while I'm working (as it's usually in my cwd anyway) and only run the root `make all` on deployment.