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The author also seems not to have discovered 'make configure' and the horrors of the automake/autoconf toolset and the m4 macro language.

Sure but these are completely orthogonal to make. Might as well complain about gcc.

If anything, it's an argument for making better use of make's own features for configuration in the first place.

what are those horrors about?

Have you tried writing (or even just reading) a configure.ac script?

sure, and there's lots of documentation around it, that's why I asked for examples of the horrors.