>Make has a fragile syntax that barely works for simple filenames
It works perfectly fine with things other than space.
>and it has a host of cryptic functions with difficult to understand semantics
This is why the GNU Make has a fantastic manual, I suggest you check it out: https://gnu.org/s/make/manual
>That it's what is installed on most Unix-style computers isn't an argument against trying to make different/better systems.
You aren't making a better system though. You're making a worse, less flexible, less understood, system that no one can hire person to work for and that won't be useful at any workplace. If you really wanted to improve over make you'd be making a general purpose tool that isn't targeting any specific project or language.
Alas, this has jack shit to do with the comment you're replying to. Let's deal with the issues we've been talking about before shifting the goalpost.
>Also, you can set SHELL to another scripting language, but that defeats much of the point of using make in the first place.
It still gives you a standard interface that packagers and users would expect for build software and you don't have to rewrite your DAG every time by hand.
>And again, you still need to spawn processes and transfer state through a fragile text interface.
You break the task into multiple parts so you hopefully don't have to run it all every time.
Text files aren't really any more fragile than any other way to tranfer the state, just write a json or whatever format you like.
>And most languages' syntaxes integrate even worse with Make's than sh does.
What integration do you want that you had in your silly hand written one?
>How do I insert commas between words to generate python lists would be my first question, and frankly I do not want to know the answer.
You can either construct a macro to do this or you can just give the data space delimited to python and change the spaces to commas there. Surely you know how to do it with python so why are you insisting on doing it with make?
>It's not true that it's impossible to design a system that was better than Make.
Of course it's possible. Too bad no one has actually attempted it.
>And the "compatibility" argument is just not there, sorry. Yes, I require python, but that's it. I wrote a simple script that just runs and build. Nothing wrong with that.
You also require your own library. Most people probably don't have this installed. Also if you wrote this at a company and left then they'd have a half-baked build system and they cannot hire anyone that's familiar with it.