make has survived all this time but it is not very well accepted today with a lot of competing build systems trying to do better. bash is very secure and moreover the Bourne shell was there first. make is falling out of favour as far as I can see even though it has had a very good run: Kernighan and Pike in their book on Unix said to use it in preference to the shell for builds. That is the background to my asking was it really necessary after all to do give up on the shell for doing builds?