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.