Personally, I don't want a programming language in my makefiles. Unless working in a very codified environment (Java and Maven, for example), I think it is vital to keep your build system as simple as you can. If I absolutely need nontrivial logic in my makefile, I would much, much rather be forced to call out to a script file (because it encourages not doing that).
And if you insist on parking a programming language into it, it should probably be something with a reasonable amount of existing knowledge and users. I like Scheme, but unless the project was written in a Lisp I'd seriously question the judgment of anybody whacking Scheme into a build file multiple people had to work with and understand.
After using Rake (ruby with some dependency DSLish stuff) on a project for a solid year, I appreciate Make much more. Rake is too powerful and makes it too easy to keep a bunch of complex logic inside the Rakefile. Our project, left unchecked, turned the Rakefile into a pile of spaghetti.
Make, on the other hand, being kind of crufty and inconvenient, encourages moving complex logic out of itself and into external scripts earlier than Rake. On top of that it encourages you to have reasonable interfaces to those scripts so that they fit back into the Makefile gracefully.
So ironically, Make, by being obtuse, ends up encouraging better overall project build structure.
What sort of issue did you run into. I am wondering if its osmething that could be solved by better modularization/sandboxing or if its more fundamental problems.
It's not a programming issue per se, it's a human issue. Rake provides a nice baseline for throwing all your quickie scripts into little functions that end up with reasonable (if basic) command line interfaces for free.
Those quickie scripts inevitably grow more complicated as the project goes on (usually because the project itself gets more complicated over time) and before long you've outgrown Rake. Except that since Rake is just Ruby it tricks you into thinking you haven't outgrown it!
I started noticing it when I was taking a bunch of time deciding in what order I should be putting the optional parameters to my Rake tasks such that it was most convenient to the user and spending way to much code validating those arguments and setting defaults when I realized that I could've written a script using 'optparse' that would easier to document, easier to use, and easier to write and modify.
There's a graph you could make where the X axis is size of the script and the Y axis is complexity (or maybe "effort"). The Rake line, drawn on this graph, starts near 0,0 but climbs and a nice steep rate. Make starts at basically the same spot as Rake but climbs way faster. A standalone command-line script starts a bit higher on the Y axis, but is flatter over all. The point at which the Rake (or Make) and the script lines meet is where you should switch to a standalone script.
With Make, this happens fairly early on when things are still relatively simple. So you convert your bash commands into a Ruby script and you end up better off in the long run. With Rake it happens so late that converting to a standalone script becomes a very large undertaking and nobody wants to do it (because it still works--why mess with it?). Over the long haul it becomes a pain point.
I hear this sort of argument all the time (build systems, templating engines, config files, etc) and I'm not sure I agree with it anymore. Invariably people start adding features and you wnd up with horrible warty languages full of corner cases like make or shell.
Yeah, limitations like these are often just a red rag to hackers that naturally love the challenge of overcoming apparent limitations with ornate workarounds. See the gmsl library mentioned in the current top post for example, which I read a bit of while trying to get a handle on the Android NDK's build system; respect to jgrahamc for its cleverness but if you don't like Make in the first place, you're inclined to feel that more of it is bad and not good.
GNU Make already is a programming language. It's just not a very good one. Wouldn't Scheme be helpful to your "don't write programs in Make"-attitude? I mean if only few people know scheme they'll be less likely to hack your Makefile.
And if you insist on parking a programming language into it, it should probably be something with a reasonable amount of existing knowledge and users. I like Scheme, but unless the project was written in a Lisp I'd seriously question the judgment of anybody whacking Scheme into a build file multiple people had to work with and understand.