When I saw that LiveScript was using Makefiles[0] to build, I was baffled. To me they were ancient and complicated C/C++ stuff. But when I looked into them, everything seemed rather straight forward, even a bit nicer than Gulp, because of the syntax.
Makefiles have some glaring issues that can't be easily fixed.
The big one is that they break if there are spaces in file or directory names.
Sure, you can argue spaces are bad practice. But they are common on OS X and windows. It's a little silly to use a build system that doesn't support them.
When I saw that LiveScript was using Makefiles[0] to build, I was baffled. To me they were ancient and complicated C/C++ stuff. But when I looked into them, everything seemed rather straight forward, even a bit nicer than Gulp, because of the syntax.