Yes, basically this news means "Ruby, python and Perl may not be preinstallled, install them yourself".
It's not a big deal for users of Homebrew or other package managers.
It's not a big deal for users of Homebrew or other package managers.
A standard installer package would be much better.
Installing via a shell command has nothing to do with the (in)ability to verify signatures. You aren’t more protected running a random installer package than an auditable shell script from the official Homebrew repo. Also, Homebrew supports more installation methods including cloning the git repo by yourself or un-taring an archive.
Homebrew circumvents all the protections built into macOS (like Gatekeeper / Xprotect etc) for convenience.
I don't think this method for distributing software has much of a future.
If the Homebrew team aren’t already busting ass to rewrite brew in Objective-C, and negotiating to get it distributed on AppStore or—ideally—included in Xcode as standard, then they’ll have no-one but themselves to blame when they utterly fail to capitalize on the massive market opportunity Apple has handed them here. Believe me, porting brew is a nothing price and the simplest step by far.
This is a once-in-a-product’s-lifetime chance for a proven FOSS platform not only to grab ten million new users but to influence a global platform vendor’s direction too. Fail to seize this opportunity or blow it execution, and you won’t get another (I speak from painful experience here).
One good upside from this deprecation is that lots of scripts naively containing "#!/bin/python" and such without invoking them through /usr/bin/env will stop working on macOS, which is good.
That being said, this is a good thing. By pinning the interpreters to ancient versions Apple is maintaining this legacy code that is often replaced by homebrew/Macports anyway.