I imagine anything short and simple enough can be finessed to be beautiful and elegant.
...but scaling from the small to the large elegantly is what make doesn't do well; and there's an astonishing number of tools designed to try to work around the problem.
A lot of people hate CMake for its strange language and (arguably) questionable design choices; but it scales to large projects without significant problems; you only have to look as far as the android native client makefiles to see how the truely heroic efforts to use make have resulted in makefiles that are only... moderately terrible, instead of absolutely aweful.
I feel like there's this nostalgic desire from many programmers to 'embrace simplicity' and avoid the complexity and annoyance of learning and using complex 3rd party tools when 'simple' solutions are good enough.
...but often those simple solutions are ever any good at a trivial scale.
...but scaling from the small to the large elegantly is what make doesn't do well; and there's an astonishing number of tools designed to try to work around the problem.
A lot of people hate CMake for its strange language and (arguably) questionable design choices; but it scales to large projects without significant problems; you only have to look as far as the android native client makefiles to see how the truely heroic efforts to use make have resulted in makefiles that are only... moderately terrible, instead of absolutely aweful.
I feel like there's this nostalgic desire from many programmers to 'embrace simplicity' and avoid the complexity and annoyance of learning and using complex 3rd party tools when 'simple' solutions are good enough.
...but often those simple solutions are ever any good at a trivial scale.