You haven't heard of Homebrew because you're not involved in bleeding edge web development on OSX, just that. It ships with really less software than fink or macports, but it actually 1) works! 2) won't destroy your system sooner or later, because everything installed is "sandboxed". Homebrew sometimes is the only way to have something working (and hey, it's ruby based, so it's trendy!)
Really: Fink and MacPorts are archaic or ships outdated versions and its a pain to use mixed libraries. Homebrew is just trying to be the solution for that, and it just works (except when you build mplayer, but that's another story). Textmate is loved by newbies as well as web developers for one simple reason: it's lightweight. That's why many people - including me - uses Textmate instead of - say - Eclipse or NetBeans: it just work, without any sort of useless stuff (and weight) around it.
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You haven't heard of Homebrew because you're not involved in bleeding edge web development on OSX, just that. It ships with really less software than fink or macports, but it actually 1) works! 2) won't destroy your system sooner or later, because everything installed is "sandboxed". Homebrew sometimes is the only way to have something working (and hey, it's ruby based, so it's trendy!) Really: Fink and MacPorts are archaic or ships outdated versions and its a pain to use mixed libraries. Homebrew is just trying to be the solution for that, and it just works (except when you build mplayer, but that's another story). Textmate is loved by newbies as well as web developers for one simple reason: it's lightweight. That's why many people - including me - uses Textmate instead of - say - Eclipse or NetBeans: it just work, without any sort of useless stuff (and weight) around it.