I have a theory that the people who love make are the same people who love macros and the people who hate make don't love them.

I wrote a book on make and I fully recognize that there are people who look at what I've written there and think I'm completely mad: https://www.nostarch.com/gnumake

Make's greatest irony is that it's a system for building files based on dependencies but has no way of actually discovering dependencies. I wrote about this for Dr Dobbs a while back: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/dependency-ma...

And make has deficiencies that are a nightmare to work around and get right (e.g. spaces in filenames, recursion, ...)

If anyone else out there is a make hacker like myself they might enjoy the GNU Make Standard Library project: http://gmsl.sourceforge.net/