Make again

Now what totally baffled me is that James Duncan Davidson's personal webpage states Make among the languages that he knows well. A bit further down the page he states that "I no longer, however, consider Makefiles to be evil. In fact, I’ve written several in the last few years." 

Now this is fine, and only troubling when you know that this is the man who made Ant, the build tool of choice of all Java persons. To build something using Ant, you have to write a Java program, at least if somebody else did not do that yet. Netbeans was ruined for me by Ant, and in its latest versions really deletes your sourcecode when it does not understand a cross language reference or something else in that vain. Actually, he also left Java and went to Ruby, which is a sensible choice, if you are in a position to choose. He also likes Objective-C and Cocoa, which is also sensible. Let's write off Ant to his job at Sun, then. I would like though, that we could undo some of Ant's damage, and have, for example, NetBeans working again with "make" projects.