You can pass arguments via the command line (it is, after all, a CLI tool): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2826029/passing-addition...

I often prefer to work in in extremis environments where there is no internet access, and hence, no easy way to get ahold of make; it's given me a bad habit of just waiting a build.bash script to do what make does most of the time. I haven't really found myself missing it that much.

I'm not so sure most people would agree with you. Though I think plenty would.

I dare say that developers like environment variables more than before. Consider that Docker images, and hence Helm charts, are entirely controlled via environment variables. These very popular dev tools suffer from the same problem of having near-zero easy discoverability of what those environment variables might be. Yet they are very popular.

But I don't think Make usually uses all that many environment variables. You're usually specifying build targets as the command line arguments. Automake and autogen usually generate these makefiles with everything hard-coded.

Also, it makes it very easy to get started with, and it is universally available. Makes it very easy to like.

It's 80% of what you want and it's installed everywhere.

You could go for something closer to exactly what you want, but now you've got an extra set up step for devs and something else for people to learn if they want to change it.

I would say if you're looking for cli args then you shouldn't be using any wrapper like make at all. Just call the underlying tool directly. Make is for doing big high level things in the standard way, nowadays quite often in CI pipelines.

Make allows you to specify dependencies for you targets, which are also targets. As such you do not need to rely on brittle string concatenation approaches. It is a tool build for this.

I personally like going to a project folder and run "make run", no matter what language or setup I have, to run the project. It enables me to unify access to projects.

I also take great care to make these runs reproducible, using lock files and other things of the ecosystems I am using, whenever possible. I work on another machine? git clone, make run. Or perhaps git clone, make init, make run.

Make is in POSIX, so it's generally available. Same reason people write shell scripts (even if the scripts are not generally POSIX-only).

You don't have to write Make invocations by hand... It's just a tool that can be called from any editor or IDE (or by automatic file watchers). Environment variables aren't really relevant to Make either, unless you really want to misuse it as a command runner.

I like it because it's language and tooling agnostic, declarative, fast and ubiquitous.

Where it's less great is complicated recipes and debugging

Because make is a prolog in disguise.

From the readme:

  VSCode Extension
    1. Open VSCode
    2. Go to Extensions (Ctrl+Shift+X)
    3. Search for "mbake Makefile Formatter"
    4. Click Install

Presumably because the author is comfortable with python and it is easy to do string manipulation with.

Why not Python? I primarily program in C++ but I see it as a decent choice as Python is available in almost all recent machines. Of course Windows is a notable exception but given it's a tool for developers I guess Python should be present.