Comment by PittleyDunkin

Man, we've seen so many replacements for make over the past two decades. Make is gonna be a really, really hard tool to unseat: it's small, it's reliable, it's pretty cross-platform, it solves a narrowly-defined problem well, and it seems like 95% of what people want is a slightly different syntax or interface.

Meanwhile, I am never going to abandon a working tool that does what it says on the tin for something users have to go out of their way to install without a really good reason. .PHONY hasn't bothered me in decades. It's a reasonable hack, imo.

Make hits a really, really sweet spot of addressing a hard problem with a simple, understandable interface. It's not too large, it's not too small, it just does one thing really, really well.