There is no value in catering to them, since that generally requires blunt rather than sharp tools, and everyone else requires sharp tools to get actual work done. They can play with their toys, but they are toys thoight up by people who care about the wrong things. Anyone else should ignore and disregard them and their ignorant ideas.
Make is probably not the final evolution of a build sysyem for eternity, merely the arguments given for python of all the ridiculous possibilities, have all been garbage so far.
Now if a proposition included some sort of canonical flavor of python (or whatever language) that can be counted on to:
- exist on any system, and "any system" does not mean "any linux intall from today forward"
- could at least be added to any system if not already, ie, plain c source that compiles even on obscure old systems, or built out of something else equally ubiquitous like shell or awk.
- single simple binary
- all features included (no libraries of plugins and modules)
- spec advances only slowly and thoughtufully and without breaking compatibility
Make already exists, meets all of these points, and provides the means to express complex jobs or simple jobs without any special built-in magic support for any one language or framework of the month, especially not at the expense of any others.
Although, even a mythical "canonical python subset" would be a strange thing to propose with it's meaninful whitespace, when one of the main complaints about make is the tabs.
Problem is if you care about the future, someone has to help the whingy babies become competent adults. Not everyone is a polymath autodidact that can absorb everything about computers like the HN crowd. Some rockstars start as whingy babies. If you don’t help them at that crucial time, the stay whingy babies, or worse, go on to become project managers. You don’t want the whingy babies managing your project.