> The engineering world would be a much better place if more people built beautiful, easy to use GUIs on top of the confusing command line apps we all rely on.
I can't tell you how much I agree with this. Far too little engineering effort is spent on nice GUIs, especially for 'niche' applications (I'm talking the sciences here in particular), because the GUI doesn't add any functionality. It's true, but it sure as hell adds productivity.
In regards to homebrew specifically though, I think the 'brew' command line app is actually one of the better ones and is actually pretty easy to use.
This is startlingly true. The more I dive into development and open-source solutions, the more worrying this becomes.
Edit: to maybe relieve the concerns of downvoters: I find it worrying because there are lots of generally productive and intelligent people who will avoid command line tools as much as possible. These are some very good programmers. This means that tools as simple as Grunt are deemed to be "too much fuss."
I'm a big user and supporter of OSS, and I try and promote it as much as possible within my colleagues and peer group. I've had some success, but that's really another story for another time.
I was "volunteered" to maintain some old scripts that we use in the lab, some were written in Algol. The older the lab/institution the more worryingly old software is required by the researchers (Don't even ask about centrifuges that should have been retired almost a trillion revs ago).
I can't tell you how much I agree with this. Far too little engineering effort is spent on nice GUIs, especially for 'niche' applications (I'm talking the sciences here in particular), because the GUI doesn't add any functionality. It's true, but it sure as hell adds productivity.
In regards to homebrew specifically though, I think the 'brew' command line app is actually one of the better ones and is actually pretty easy to use.