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Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by cstross on Saturday August 31, 2019 @08:04AM (#20845812)
About bloody time!

Apple don't keep their scripting languages updated. For example, macOS Mojave 10.14.6 ships with perl 5, version 18, subversion 4 (v5.18.4) in /usr/bin/perl; but my homebrew setup provides perl 5, version 30, subversion 0 (v5.30.0).

(And for those who don't know perl, it's been semi-permanently pinned at "perl 5" as a major version number for about 20 years due to the existence of perl 6, which is effectively a different language—as different as C++ is from C—so those minor version number differences are as significant as a major version number change in another language.)

Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by hpcjoe on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:20AM (#20846113)
I generally set up my own toolchain, with up to date versions of Perl 5, Python, Julia, R, Octave. I've found the system distro installed tooling to be too ancient for productive use.

While this doesn't bother me much per se, the issue I see as looming is what I've experienced on a few platforms. Where their "protection" mechanisms effectively prevent you from building the code you need to function effectively.

I usually test each (new) platform by taking my code and trying to build it. If the platform is important to what I do, I'll spend some time making sure it builds correctly, and passes regression testing.

WSL in Windows 10, albeit running on a kvm on my linux laptop, does not pass muster as a system worth targeting for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that the environment breaks the regression testing.

My concern is that MacOS gets to that point. Its getting close, as I have to specifically allow perl/python/julia/jupyter to open ports. I suspect that soon MacOS will disable this capability.

I already run Linux everywhere, MacOS is just what the corporate folks indicate is an acceptable alternative to Windows 10, which doesn't work for me. Once MacOS doesn't work, it will be far easier to argue for corporate issued Linux laptops.

Alienating DevOps, developers, hpc/ai folks ... not really a good idea. But hey, Apple does Apple, so why not.

[Edited for grammar]

Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by ohmybrew on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:04AM (#20846046)
Do you use Perl a lot? I haven't used it extensively since probably 2004.
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by hpcjoe on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:22AM (#20846130)
I use it daily. Have done so since early 90s.
[dead]
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by hpcjoe on Saturday August 31, 2019 @05:08PM (#20848796)
I prefer using the term experienced.
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by weberc2 on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:13AM (#20846082)
Whoa, I’ve been using Mac for almost a decade and I never knew it shipped with perl!
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by ingve on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:18AM (#20846104)
It was even used in some unexpected places, for example, see the HN discussion about "Apple's libc shells out to Perl to implement wordexp" [0], [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025572

[1] https://github.com/Apple-FOSS-Mirror/Libc/blob/2ca2ae7464771...

Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by snazz on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:18AM (#20846106)
Most Unix systems do. Apple just does a terrible job of keeping scripting runtimes up to date.
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by selectodude on Saturday August 31, 2019 @10:02AM (#20846305)
Everything seems to be frozen in time at just before a project changed to GPL 3
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by crocbuzz on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:19AM (#20846109)
To be fair, Mojave comes pre-installed with the latest release of Python and PHP.
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by tazard on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:28AM (#20846150)
Mine came with python 2.7 and php 7.1 not exactly the latest releases.
Re:Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions... by hanniabu on Saturday August 31, 2019 @10:17AM (#20846395)
Python 2 is the real python /s