Cool comparison. Both guys helped shape early computing but in totally different ways, one pushing from the garage, the other from within the system. It’s a good reminder that innovation doesn’t follow one path and impact isn’t always loud or obvious at first.
Make is still king in 2025.
I don't understand why someone would use Just or Taskfile instead of Make.
My only hypothesis is that people believe (erroneously) that whatever is new is automatically better than what is older.
I use Task and like it, though I have used make before and don't think it's awful.
Task's tracking of the source and the output feels cleaner than make's need for a clean command. I can have a tree of dependent tasks and it will rebuild the ones that are outdated without me doing a "make clean" and having to rebuild all of them.
The ability to include files is clean, though similar can be done in make with some recursion (which works, but I find hacky and hard to keep track of).
I also don't love make's DSL. I don't edit my build files often enough to really keep it in my head, so I feel like I'm constantly trying to remember how to do particular things.
Lastly, I think it's easier to share because even if you've never used Task the YAML is pretty self-descriptive. The first time I saw a Taskfile it wasn't hard to grok how it worked. Make is pretty opaque if you've never seen a Makefile before, and I've met a lot of junior devs that have never interacted with it.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 19.3 ms ] threadBut, from a european gamedev standpoint, I have never worked in a company that professionally depended on github-actions.
All I ever saw was Gitlab-CI and Jenkins (and a small instance of buildbot).
So seeing the absolute dominance of github-actions is somewhat jarring to me and doesn't paint a picture of my lived reality.
That said; none of what I'm talking about is open source - but I would expect to see more gitlab-ci in this list.
Task's tracking of the source and the output feels cleaner than make's need for a clean command. I can have a tree of dependent tasks and it will rebuild the ones that are outdated without me doing a "make clean" and having to rebuild all of them.
The ability to include files is clean, though similar can be done in make with some recursion (which works, but I find hacky and hard to keep track of).
I also don't love make's DSL. I don't edit my build files often enough to really keep it in my head, so I feel like I'm constantly trying to remember how to do particular things.
Lastly, I think it's easier to share because even if you've never used Task the YAML is pretty self-descriptive. The first time I saw a Taskfile it wasn't hard to grok how it worked. Make is pretty opaque if you've never seen a Makefile before, and I've met a lot of junior devs that have never interacted with it.