give pmake a shot sometime.. the syntax/semantics are much more 'shell-like' imho and some things are just much more possible.. (e.g. looping rather than recursive calls to function definitions)

manual: ('make' on a bsd is PMake)

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=make&apropos=0&sek...

but most linux flavors have a package somewhere..