I prefer task over just, while I am not a huge fan of YAML, we now use it everywhere so it just makes sense to not learn yet another DSL for Just and just use YAML.

How do task and just compare to SCons?

Although SCons is Python (which is a pro or con depending upon your perspective), it has strong dependency management. Or is the argument that dependency management is part of build, not general project maintenance?

Starting out from the blog post, it talks essentially about Make as it was intended, as a build system to compile programs with. Make maps this to the task of producing a file from input files, which are written down in the form of rules in a Makefile. a key ingredient from make is that it checks for timestamps on disk for the source files and updates targets only if the source files have been modified after the targets have been built.

If you go a bit further down this route, you end up with build tools that generate the compilation rules for you in some form: These are Automake/CMake/Meson and SCons. I did use scons years ago and it was nice, but its definitely completely lost its market share. IIRC Scons does this without generating Makefiles.

Task and Just are following a different route. The problem people have solved by using a "hack" in Makefiles (PHONY targets), so that you can easily run "sub-commands" in Make (make install_deps, etc). It would never occur to me to use Scons in that space.

Btw. a third option is to use a shell script like the following (POSIX-shell compatible actually).

  sub_install_deps() {
   set -e -x
   # ...
  }

  sc=$1
  case $sc in
  "" | "-h" | "--help")
   sub_help
   ;;
  *)
   shift
   "sub_${sc}" "$@"
   if [ $? = 127 ]; then
    echo "Error: '${sc}' is not a known sc." >&2
    echo "       Run '${prog_name} --help' for a list of known scs." >&2
    exit 1
   fi
   ;;
  esac