make is pretty neat if you think about it as a framework to help you compute/derive values from other values. each value happens to be stored in the filesystem as a file.

in contrast, many of the newer build-tool make replacements seem to miss the whole value of values and either push or force you in a direction of doing actions with side effects.

   file 'blogpost.html' # we want to produce blogpost.html

   # this rule specifies how to build 
   # any .html from the source
   rule ".html" => ".md" do |t| 
      sh "pandoc -o #{t.name} #{t.source}"
   end