Makefiles are terrible tech. The problem is that they're slightly less bad than most other build system we've come up with, which makes them "useful" in a masochistic way.

Build systems tend to commit one or more of the following sins:

* Too basic: Once you try to build anything beyond a toy, it quickly becomes chaos.

* Too complicated: The upfront required knowledge, bureaucracy, synchronization and boilerplate is ridiculous. The build system itself takes an order of magnitude more data and memory than the build target.

* No standard library (or a substandard one that does things poorly or not at all): You must define everything yourself, leading to 10000 different incompatible implementations of the same build patterns. So now no one can just dive in and know what they're doing.

* Too constricting: The interface wasn't built as a simple layer upon an expert layer. So now as soon as your needs evolve, you have to migrate away.

* Too much magic: The hallmark of a poorly designed system. It doesn't have to be turtles all the way down, but it should be relatively close with few exceptions.

* Cryptic or inconsistent syntax.

  #include <stdio.h>
  int main(int ac, char **av) { printf("hello\n"); return 0; }