I don't really like Make as a build system, especially since today every language I've worked with has a much better one - cargo, uv, cmake, bazel, others.
My thing is that it's ubiquitous and if you stay simple, the syntax is perfectly readable; if you're doing anything complicated, I'll argue you don't want your logic in a Makefile anyway, you want it in a shell script or a Python script.
I get that if you want to do really complicated things, Just can be more ergonomic. But I haven't seen any real argument that it's more ergonomic, or understandable, or worth the learning curve, when your Makefiles are simple or have actual scripts doing the complicated stuff.
`just --list` is indeed missing (though I hear make is adding a --print-targets flag), but I usually need to run the same commands - make run, make test, make typecheck, make lint, make format. Note how none of these take an argument - that's also something I've never found myself needing.
That’s the thing: just is a lot simpler and cleaner for the simple things, too. Like not requiring .PHONY, for instance. And if you already have to install cargo/uv/cmake, add just to that list of dependencies.
The argument stuff is nice when you realize you’re no longer constrained by not having easy access to it. I used just to build my blog, and added a target to create a template entry whenever I updated to a new release of certain software. I could write “just newversion 1.2.3” to publish an announcement using the same mechanisms that did everything else. Without that feature, I could have scripted something up to do the same. With it, I didn’t have to. I wouldn’t have tried that with make.
My thing is that it's ubiquitous and if you stay simple, the syntax is perfectly readable; if you're doing anything complicated, I'll argue you don't want your logic in a Makefile anyway, you want it in a shell script or a Python script.
I get that if you want to do really complicated things, Just can be more ergonomic. But I haven't seen any real argument that it's more ergonomic, or understandable, or worth the learning curve, when your Makefiles are simple or have actual scripts doing the complicated stuff.
`just --list` is indeed missing (though I hear make is adding a --print-targets flag), but I usually need to run the same commands - make run, make test, make typecheck, make lint, make format. Note how none of these take an argument - that's also something I've never found myself needing.