Make is possibly the most popular thing people re-invent for specific platforms.

Touch of irony in this project, with that Makefile sitting in the root directory.

EDIT: My apologies if the above comment was cynical. There's a salient need for workflow systems which provide features above/beyond the basics of make. Built-in things like a central broker, adjustable worker processes, scheduling and history. Python/Luigi is an example of such a workflow system, yet it keeps the workflow definitions very similar to Make for conciseness