Yes! But I'm not so sure we can entirely blame the make syntax. Something made the CMake people believe that inventing a new macro language / m4-redux was a good idea. I'm thinking that either m4 is a mind-virus or they're serving wine in lead glasses at the annual build-system conferences.
Makefiles work fine in the trivial case, the problem is that things quickly become complex. Automating that complexity seems like it should be easy but, as it turns out, it isn't.
Is there something about the (admittedly very difficult and thankless) task of automating builds that justifies re-inventing the wagon-wheel of languages? Because that was my specific complaint, and there's a reason why it was specific.
Because it seems easy. And easy things done "wrong" require re-invention.
There should be a way to $FOO. Well, there's a way to do it in a Makefile but figuring that out is harder than should be, and doesn't make sense when you finally do figure it out.
CMake started for needing a suitable build system for a medical visualization application[0][1] that Kitware was working on, iiuc. How they could be using Tcl (an established, purpose built embeddable scripting/control language) in the Insight project, come to the conclusion they need a custom build system, and then when it comes to a control language decide to roll their own is a mystery to me, and a dropped ball, as far as I'm concerned.
I like cmake, and used to use it exclusively, but after running into so many issues with their homebrew scripting/configuration language, I've mostly moved on. I wouldn't be surprised if I end up coming back, and I'd encourage everybody to give it a shot (the ease of typical simple Makefile generation, but with extra muscle), but the omission of Tcl as a control/config tool has always baffled me.
