I’ve used make for many things over the years. I’m competent with it. Make is such a breath of fresh air for the uses that don’t involve actually incrementally building software. It’s sooo less verbose. It’s hard to describe the feel of a thing, but imagine learning to program with Java and then finding Python. If you’re building a giant app developed by thousands of people, maybe Java’s complexity starts to show a benefit. If you just want to quickly script something up, Python gets the job done with a tenth the boilerplate.

There’s room for both. Neither replaces the other. But it turns out many of my projects need tools closer to Python/Just than Java/Make.