The `just` tool is a better and much easier to understand command runner than `make`, however. Much less feature surface, too, which eliminates nasty surprises coming from the unnecessary complexity of `make`.

There are a pletora of tools better than Make. But it's a standard tool, everyone is familiar with it, you probably don't even have to install it.

`just` is 90% similar to `make` in syntax, only it has 100x less foot guns. :)

Also I'll never understand the appeal of "not having to install a tool". We're not in the 1980s anymore when that was an actual chore. You run a command, the tool is there (including in CI/CD), boom, done. What am I missing here?

The advantages you list are flimsy at best.

Bootstrapping can be painful in some languages or frameworks. Not everyone is running containerised builds where there are ephemeral environments that you just install a tool (and pay the 30+ second cost per build to run apt-get update). There’s certainly value in having a front door entry point. But I think it should be a shell script, not a makefile.

Yes to your last. Either sh/bash script or a precompiled Golang program. If installing a tool is really such a problem then having a precompiled strongly typed program doing various tasks should be a no-brainer.

I started openly hating `make` because I re-learned its specifics and quirks several times over the course of 10-ish years and then figured that I want to learn stuff with a staying power in my brain. I don't use `make` every work day so eventually any quirks disappear -- that's how our brains work.

So that's why I learned most of `just` and it hasn't betrayed me so far, not once. Though I did write a few Elixir and Golang programs for running various tasks in production environment, too.

At that point you end up with a makefile that has a 1:1 mapping with targets in my experience. At a previous job, we had an enormous makefile, most of which was defining phone targets and translating make arguments into maven arguments. All the actual targets were calling maven. Make provided no value at all in that, other than requiring you to know Make and maven to modify anything in the build.

Personally I’d rather a shell script for a command runner in most cases

Yeah, mine often just defers back to some shell scripts. But it's useful to enumerate them in the Makefile.

If you have a telltale prefix for any internal phony targets (I use "_"), then you can have the Makefile list all the interesting targets itself. Cat the Makefile, print every line matching "^\.PHONY:[[:space:]]*[^_]", then strip out the prefix. Leave any suffix, as you can put a trailing comment in, e.g.,

    .PHONY:build_windows # build for Windows. Supply DEBUG=1 for a debug build

I find this super useful. Even if you remember exactly what the target was called, it still gives you a nice list of words you can double click on to pull into the command line.