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.
Yes. Make is just a DSL for file-based dependency management.
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.
Exactly what I was thinking. Use a scripting language you're proficient at. This article doesn't make Make look worth the trouble if you don't have a more specific reason to use it. Too much complexity, and quirks like you’ll need to delete the previously-downloaded zip file before running make can easily be avoided with a scripting language.
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.
If you're using a series of shell commands, each of which takes seconds to hours to run, you will be happy with make's ability to (1) run shell commands easily and (2) not run them again when they don't need to be run. You could write a dependency tracking thingy in any programming language, but at that point you might as well be using Rake or some other make replacement.
Agreed, I generate documents with graphs and calculations in them for my research, but I tend to document and automate them with python scripts rather than makefiles, because python does not make my brain hurt.
Like a programming language?