If you just want to run commands in the order written down, don't need the topological sorting feature of make and value ubiquity then a shell script is the answer.

If you are not stuck in the past and you truly live by the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, a command runner is the answer.

The command runner avoids the ton of foot guns both shell scripts (no matter which flavor) and make files have. just also brings a couple of features out of the box that would be very tedious and error prone that replicate in make and shell scripts.

I don't particularly mind this use of make, but as an article on make it fails to exemplify what I think is its main purpose.

I rewrote my makefile in PS and don't miss anything from make and have no regrets, as it is simpler now.

Make is from 1976. I don't think you can legitimately refer to it as that.

I don't have any of those concerns with GNU Make.

Just has quite a few features and it's at version 1.35.

That would've been a pretty short window of time since make first came out (according to wikipedia) in 1976.

I seem to recall it being praised very highly at the time as a great tool that saved many billable expensive CPU minutes and made a developer's job so much easier.

That it what a lot of SW developers forget: your code might be the best in the world, but , if someone is not able to build it, it is useless.

Make isn’t a silver bullet for builds. It isn’t even a bullet. Most software gets built from scratch and make’s deps graph makes little to zero sense in this mode. Make is a quirky poor dev tool footgun, jack of all trades master of none.

Until it doesn't. And then you really have to learn about PHONY targets, why and when there must be a tab and not spaces - good luck with an editor that doesn't treat Makefiles special and is configured to convert tabs to spaces.

Because it isn't fun checking if the whitespace at the beginning of the line is a tab or spaces. And as said, you must know when to use tabs and/or spaces in rules.

For doing such a simple thing as calling some commands, Make has way too many subtle footguns which _will_ bite somebody, someday. The problem (that's not a problém at all, that's a reason to celebrate!) is that most JS devs and users aren't used to Make, compared to e.g. C programmers. To rephrase: as someone writing C, you have to use something like a Makefile, as anything else (like scripts) gets unreadable and -usable quite fast. But if you can get away with a less complex solution, you should really use that instead of Make.

that's why https://editorconfig.org/ exists, so that neither you nor your teammates have to think about these things

You're better off using a Makefile linter. But you must know about the problem before being able to solve it. And error messages like

   Makefile:2: *** missing separator.  Stop.

Is that Stockholm syndrome? Or an appeal to history/authority in action? What makes people believe that this is even remotely reasonable.

inb kids these days, I started in the '90s and wrote my share of makefiles. Tolerating make only made sense until 2010-ish, then both hw and sw advances rendered it useless.

Edit: just realized my reply to a wrong person, but let it stay here

If you're using make a glorified task runner, why don't you just create a scripts/ directory with shell scripts to do whatever you want. This is simpler, cleaner and works everywhere.

Make doesn't really add anything. I get the feeling that using make this way is an aesthetic preference that has somehow developed with time into a "this is the one true Unix way" cargo cult.