Make was never a tool that I was in love with and over the years I've used Ant quite a lot but Ant is pretty geared toward Java, just as several other tools (Grunt, Rake, etc.) are all about some other language and tool stack.
Is there a modern tool that is:
a) cross-platform
b) pretty language agnostic
c) easy to use
for all the automated tasks that developers want to do, but with a more modern set of features and ease of use than Make had.