You know what you have to do to build git? Type make. It's amazing.
Not necessarily.
> It’s also pretty much guaranteed to already be installed and working on every nix system, and that's not nothing.
First mover advantage.
The fact that no modern language, basically nothing outside of C/C++ uses it, says a lot. And even those are moving away, see Cmake & co.
That's how it has always been, though. In the '90s you didn't need to run Perl or Tcl through it because you weren't compiling anything. The Venn diagram of "Platforms that have make" and "Popular compiled languages" comes up with only asm/C/C++.
Many languages want to do things their way, such as Erlang, Common Lisp, Java, etc. Ruby and Python are interpreted and also don't need a build process. JS, until recently, was interpreted. Lots of NIH going around.
> And even those are moving away, see Cmake & co.
Cmake is closer to autoconf/automake/libtool. If you have serious cross-platform needs, then Cmake is a fine tool. But it's hardly less archaic than make (and only slightly less so than autoconf) and I'm dubious that too many people are really moving away rather than just picking up the newer, shiny tool for newer projects.
If I were doing a small static website or something that required a build with standard *ix tools, vanilla make would be my tool of choice, hands down. Tools like autoconf and, as the author pointed out, webpack provide a more specialized need.
Pascal/Delphi were wildly popular in the late 80's, early 90's, though. I don't remember it being built with make, though.
Make was created by Stuart Feldman at Bell Labs in 1976. The fact that it is still in use in any form and still being discussed here is a testament to what an amazingly good job he did at the time. Whether it is the right tool for any given modern use case is up to the people who decide to use it or pass it by. I still work with almost daily, and it's in wide use by backend system engineers if my experience is any guide. Yes, it's quite clunky but also quite powerful and reliable at the few things it does. Its also pretty much guaranteed to already be installed and working on every nix system, and that's not nothing.