Python 2 was removed in Monterey 12.3, which was incredibly stupid and disruptive as it caught everyone by surprise. We all knew Apple said they would remove it, but everyone was expecting them to be sensible and do it on a new major OS release, like they did with PHP, not mid-cycle.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

I wonder if that kerfuffle is why they ended up not removing Ruby and Perl yet, despite the same promise. macOS’ Ruby is around 2.6. Perl I somehow doubt they’ll get to, as it’s such an important part of Unix admin I bet they themselves use it somewhere.

There is still a /usr/bin/python3 which is a shim. When you call it, if you don’t have the Xcode Developer Tools you’ll be asked to install them (it’s a non-scary GUI dialog which takes two clicks) and then you’re set. That is also a few versions behind the cutting edge, but it does get updated sometimes.

I think that by now we shouldn’t take a .0 major release as a sign of what is really going to be present in macOS and what’s not. The OS stabilizes around .4 or so, and in the meantime some deprecated things may get removed, too.

They also have a habit of sometimes add or change some APIs mid-cycle, so you may see requirements for the latest Xcode being a mid-cycle version of the OS. Or how was it with Mac App Store, that not only itself, but the relevant APIs for programs distributed in it appeared in 10.6.4?

/usr/bin/python3 is showing 3.9.6 on my Sequoia 15.5. That seems... ancient. I'm using 3.13 for all my work and personal projects.

> [Software that was officially EOL and no longer supported by the developer as of January 1, 2020 — even though they went back on that with an emergency patch in April] was removed in [an OS released on October 25, 2021], which was incredibly stupid and disruptive as it caught everyone by surprise [despite the fact that the intent to EOL that software was declared many years ahead of time, and that sunset date already represented an extension of multiple years to the usual release schedule].

I will never understand this.

But then, I've been using Python 3 since 3.2 and my first reaction to that was a sigh of relief, and by the time I updated to 3.4 I was already wondering why everyone else was lagging behind on the switch.

> I will never understand this.

Perhaps because your interpretation of my comment is wrong.

> was removed in [an OS released on October 25, 2021]

No, no it was not! That would have been fine. Heck, it would even have been fine if they had removed it the year before. Two years. Three. I don’t care. The problem is that it was removed on a point release (not October) without warning, after setting the precedent of removing another language on a major release.

> But then, I've been using Python 3 since 3.2 and my first reaction to that was a sigh of relief

And I don’t even care about Python. But I still had to deal with the fallout from that from things I didn’t write.

> The problem is that it was removed on a point release (not October) without warning, after setting the precedent of removing another language on a major release.

My perspective is that the problem is that people were trying to use Python 2 after January 1, 2020. I left it behind years before that.

I dont think python is pre-installed on macOS now. (uv has replaced it for me)

Edit: Unlike older versions of macOS that came with Python 2.7 pre-installed, newer macOS versions (Catalina and later) no longer include Python pre-installed.

Technically macOS doesn’t come with Python pre-installed, but it does provide you with a simple path to do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580198

The removal was in Monterey. Catalina and its successor Big Sur very much still had it. Catalina was the one that removed 32-bit support.

I think they realised the security implications,

you could just take a random person macbook, open the terminal and launch python3 -m http.server 3000 --directory ~

then on the local network you could download all his files

If you have access to their MacBook and can open a terminal, even `rsync` (which comes preinstalled) would do the job.

It seems much more likely to me they were just tired of having to manage the languages (and being constantly criticised they were behind) and simply chose to remove them.

This doesn't make much sense. With physical access, I could easily just download python and do the same thing. Or anything else.

macOS dropped PHP recently too—doing a wonderful job of losing all that developer share that Apple was slowly building up.

Why? Installing python and php can be done in 2 seconds with brew, and you have control over what you install instead of using whatever is in the system, with deprecated versions, etc. It is actually much better now. System tool should be left to the system.

Virtually zero professional developers that I know use built in Python or PHP. Maybe it’s good enough for occasional scripting purposes, though.

I think it’s better for developers to not have conflicting system distributions.

Though for a while there having built in interpreters was great for kids and learners.

I much prefer installing it myself, with the required version for my project and at a known and common location.

That's fair enough. It may be less of an issue for experienced developers, but for those looking to learn the craft, it's one more barrier.

if you install commandline tools there's

/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Library/Frameworks/Python3.framework/