rterzi

No need to symlink manually, the `alternatives` mechanism will handle that for you.

"Ship with" is a bit too ambiguous for my taste. F28/F29 "ship with" Python 2 in the sense that the packages are there, just not installed with a default install. If you `dnf install python2` (or something that depends on Python 2.7) it will get installed. They've also gone through the effort and moved the system stuff line dnf to Python 3.

First, This is about RHEL 8 (Beta) not 7, 6, etc. Second `#!/usr/bin/python` is a different animal than `#!/usr/bin/env python`. One is hard coded. The other is `PATH` based so will change depending on current `PATH`.

On RHEL 7 (and earlier) `/usr/bin/python` must be the Python 2 the system shipped with or your break `yum` and other admin tools. When people try to install their own python by doing a `make install` as root, `yum` breaks and it's hard to recover the system.

What the article is saying is that RHEL 8 addresses this by having a platform python that the system tools use. So RHEL 8 tools will not use /usr/bin/python

Fedora at least as of F28, moved to have system tools like dnf use Python 3.

For RHEL 8, the tools included with the system will use a different binary, platform-python that isn't in /usr/bin.

I can't remember if that's also the case for F28/F29.

#!/usr/bin/env python is almost guaranteed to give you a surprise at some point. If someone has a virtualenv or conda env active in that shell it will be a different python environment (with different installed modules) than in other shells.

APL has a long an interesting history. It was successfully used for decades in Wall Street firms.

It's also worth looking at

* The A+ programming language, an APL derivative created at Morgan Stanley by Arthur Whitney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%2B_(programming_language).

Roger Hui also worked there for a number of year.s

* The J language from Roger Hui - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Hui#J_language

* Arthur Whitney and Kx Systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scien...