Yeah, to me the language (ruby) has nothing to do with the success of Homebrew, it is entirely about the DX around backend packaging. The main reason I switched from MacPorts to Homebrew back in the day is because when a new version of [insert software here] was released, I could expect the brew package to be updated within days. MacPorts always lagged significantly behind, and oftentimes didn't have certain packages at all.
As best I can tell, that's partially due to the size of the community, but also because Homebrew went out of their way to teach the system to fish via the 3(?) different kinds of "check for updates" built into the Formulae:
When Homebrew started (and when I switched) the community was significantly smaller than MacPorts. It is due to the system you mention (and the community that this MX in turn cultivated) that allowed brew to dominate the mac packaging market.
Absolutely MacPorts and Sapphire can adopt the same strategy, but the point is that brew already has, so what exactly would the benefit be? e.g. if the language of choice is effectively meaningless, re-writing homebrew in Rust serves effectively no purpose. This is contrasted with systems and software where the performance or correctness is the most important feature, and therefore RIIR can be a big win.
Said another way: Brew was not "re-write MacPorts in Ruby", it had much loftier goals which it then executed on effectively. Sapphire mostly seems to be "re-write Brew in Rust", without much beyond that. So the only real gain is a bit more performance out of the CLI.
I kept hearing how great macports was with “separation from the system” and being more unixy and tried it two times. Both times it ended up borked. To their credit, it is very easy to uninstall (but not “one task” as it should be). I have never broken brew. I mean I've had packages not work, but the systems itself never got broken because of libraries or broken installs, I could always back out a broken package easily.
I can't remember the last time my "brewup" alias failed me
I completely agree. I think Ruby has actually been a pretty great boon of a language choice because of the formula DSL, but that goes back to the DX point and not something fundamental to the language.
Merely for your consideration, Ruby is great if you live in that codebase all the time, but Ruby -- in general, not just Homebrew -- has indescribably bad discoverability. I mean that both in terms of "what can I write where my cursor is?" and its friend "where the hell did this symbol under my cursor come from?"
I'm acutely aware someone's going to say LSP something or Rubymine something else but as for drive-by contributions, ... anyway, like I said, just for your consideration
I've tried to love Ruby and use it daily for money, but by far the best justifications I have for the RoR dev experience are: it keeps me employed, and it's great if you're the one who wrote everything.
