The example in the blogpost is understandably trivial, and it can be implemented in almost any Make-like system.

The concept of Make is not unique. Everything that has dependencies and executes steps is similar to Make in concept. Drake is no exception, and it can be replaced with Make, but no more so than Rake, Ant or Maven can be replaced by Make. That is, if it's trivial - yes. Just a bit more complicated - no.

Some things are merely painful to implement with Make, some are just impossible:

  - multiple outputs
  - no-input and no-output steps
  - HDFS support
  - Hadoop's partial files support (part-?????)
  - forced execution of any subbranch, up or down the tree or any individual targets (crucial for debugging and development)
  - target exclusions
  - protocol abstraction - inline Python is just one example
  - tags
  - branching
  - methods

These are just what's implemented already. Other things are planned such as:

  - automated data versioning (backup and revert)
  - parallelization
  - real-time status console
  - retries, email notifications
  - etc.

Requirements for building executables and working with large, complicated and expensive data workflows are quite visible different, and the most important thing about Drake is that it provides the platform for convenient features (such as versioning or email notifications) to be implemented. And once they are, every data workflow can take advantage of them.

I guess, if Make was really, really extendable, we could have considered it as a platform for all this. But it's not, and hacking all of that into Make's source code in C would be, I'm sure, a much greater pain than writing Drake.

Artem.