You have to understand where we came from. Development for iOS and macOS (then MacOS) meant you had to pluck source files from random places on the internet and weave them into your Xcode build. Xcode and xcodebuild didn't really shine in the department of extensibility.

Eloy designed CocoaPods to be the absolute minimum we needed to deal with dependencies for the projects we were working on. So that meant:

* Rely on GitHub for hosting so nobody would get bankrupted running the repo, with the option to switch over to self-hosted in case that ever became necessary. * Use Git and existing project tools on GitHub to deal with external contributions for pods. * Use Ruby for scripting because that was what people used most at that time. * Use Ruby for pod definitions for flexibility and reduced development time (ie. so CocoaPods didn't need a parser).

For a long time this was a one-person effort.

All of those decision obviously have downsides, even more obvious now you have to power of hindsight given years of incremental improvements on speed and security of dependency managers.

I think Eloy did a great job in general and the popularity gained speaks for itself.

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mrbombastic 7 days ago | parent [-]

I am going to start sounding like a dinosaur but I really hate this dev tendency to trash the old way as soon as the new way comes out. I am seeing it with all the devs advocating for mise over asdf, and a year ago they were all singing asdf’s praises. I think we can advocate for better while still thanking those we are building upon. Long winded way of saying: thanks to the cocoapods maintainers, you made iOS dev better for a lot of people.

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eviks 7 days ago | parent [-]

> and a year ago they were all singing asdf’s praises.

This can't be true, many people recognized all the deficiencies contemporaneously and even complained about them publicly?

	▲	mrbombastic 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not sure what you mean exactly, but what I assume happens is someone finds the new thing and the old things deficiencies become more apparent because they are both called out by creators of the new thing and probably a major reason the new thing exists. The devs that found new thing start advocating for it while bashing the old thing. Like I said I think it is fine and healthy to advocate for and want to improve tooling, it just bugs me when it is done while bashing what was likely a fairly thankless labor of love.