Naturally, trying to do anything even slightly complex with it quickly leads to an unreadable cacophony of dollar signs, backslashes, and soft and hard tabs (you need both!). Just like the modern YAML-based systems, Make’s language wasn’t originally intended to be a full scripting language, but had scripting bolted on because people needed it. If only it had chosen to embed a real programming language instead, you could have the functionality without sacrificing readability.
https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Functions...
Naturally, trying to do anything even slightly complex with it quickly leads to an unreadable cacophony of dollar signs, backslashes, and soft and hard tabs (you need both!). Just like the modern YAML-based systems, Make’s language wasn’t originally intended to be a full scripting language, but had scripting bolted on because people needed it. If only it had chosen to embed a real programming language instead, you could have the functionality without sacrificing readability.