They solved their own problem but not everyone else's. If–as they state–complex projects present challenges for Make, then rewriting their build system in a DSL of the language they understand (Haskell) solves their own pain point but not everyone else's. Take this to its logical conclusion, every large project goes away and re-implements Make using a DSL of a language favoured by the community. This seems to me to be locally optimal but globally sub-optimal. We have to learn a new DSL per-project just to tweak the build system. No thank you. It's a bad move in the meta-game.
Much better to reach out to other projects and figure out how to make Make better, no?
Sometimes I think great coders (10x coders) can work against themselves. Because they are such great coders they are able to re-implement in situ rather than improve the stuff they get from over the fence. If Make is really that bad make Make better in a language-neutral way.
I think it is highly unlikely that make would implement the features described in this paper. Furthermore the paper points out many fundamental design flaws in make (all variables are strings, the macro language is not a real PL) that I doubt will ever change.
Much better to reach out to other projects and figure out how to make Make better, no?
Sometimes I think great coders (10x coders) can work against themselves. Because they are such great coders they are able to re-implement in situ rather than improve the stuff they get from over the fence. If Make is really that bad make Make better in a language-neutral way.