@neauoire interesting how many people are opposed to make in this thread. definitely smells like distaste born of generated makefiles (autotools, cmake) and makefiles that try to be too clever with magic calls.

make at it's core provides a very simple yet very powerful mechanism of dependency based shell execution, which alone makes it very easy to reason about and write 'recipes' for any common tasks (not just builds) you want to do in a project without reinventing half of it in shell.