make.py

There's a much simpler Python-based alternative[1] called make.py. I rely heavily on Makefiles, and only recently learned about make.py. What Makefiles let you do is great, but make syntax is an absolute minefield. [1] https://github.com/zwegner/make.py

In five or ten minutes you can learn make.py[1], a dead-simple alternative to Makefiles. Those are both examples of "automated build tools". If you do data science, and have even a moderately complex graph of dependencies (i.e. some files need to be built before others can be built), such a tool is an absolute lifesaver. [1] https://github.com/zwegner/make.py

Note that the author of that paper (a friend of mine) wrote another build system, the dead-simple-but-awesome make.py. I have a mirror/fork of it[0], since it's been unmaintained for a while (but it mostly doesn't need any maintenance). The entire build system is a single Python script that's less than 500 lines of code. Rather than trying to fit complicated rules into Make's arcane syntax, rules are specified with a Python script, a rules.py file (see [1]). But the script should be thought of more as a declarative specification: the rules.py file is executed once at startup to create the dependency graph of build outputs, and the commands to build them. Yet, despite the small size, it's generally easier to specify the right dependencies, do code generation steps, and get full CPU utilization across many cores. At some point I'd like to w