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Comment by jayshua | Hacker News Reader

The concepts behind make are quite good, but the interface it provides is not decidedly not. It reminds me of Git in that respect. I'd think replacing the opaque symbols used everywhere with more descriptive words would be helpful. I don't suppose anyone knows if modern Make versions support alternatives to $@, $%, $?, etc. that can be read rather than memorized?

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You _could_ do something like this:

   make -f- << sed 's/MAKE_TARGET/\$@/' Makefile.descriptive

But for the sake of compatibility I wouldn't.

No need for ugly sed error-prone trickery.

Use on the Makefile:

    MAKE_TARGET := /some/path

And invoke

    $ make MAKE_TARGET=/other/path

His point was that all of $@, $%, $? have more descriptive names as well, you don't need to use these single character macros.

Also you probably meant ?= instead of := as the command you gave would still use /some/path instead of /other/path if you use :=.

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