Created in 1977, Make has its quirks. But whether you prefer GNU Make or a more recent alternative, consider the benefits of capturing your workflow in a machine-readable format.
Like a programming language?
Like a programming language?
You could certainly write makefiles in another language, but chances are it would be a lot more verbose and probably less portable. Of course there are other make tools apart from Make, so feel free to use whatever you feel is best suited.
These days any relatively convoluted task that I may need to do more than once, I cook it in Ruby (and sprinkle some AppleScript/appscript if it involves UI). Languages like Ruby or Python offer a good balance of flexibility and abstraction for this kind of automation.