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I'm not a big fan of brew however. Last time I checked it didn't seem to work well when switching between users.
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AFAIK, macOS comes with Python 2.7 and without pip. For any serious, modern , Python development you need to install Python 3 yourself.
Again the word "serious" is there telling me people are absolutely aloof to the kinds of new developers there are and what it's like to be a non programmer.
Probably the right call - many of them don’t have abi or api stability guarantees, or in the case of python needlessly broke backwards compatibility that is still causing pain today. Apple used to ship an incredibly old version of OpenSSL because people used its API which was not ABI stable. Even getting rid of it was a nontrivial amount of work. The lack of care about API&ABI stability in developer facing open sourc…
However, software that neglects to update also tends to breakdown as libraries change to reflect new knowledge.
If you're developing software based on someone else's library you are implicitly accepting the demand to modify your software to maintain currency with those underlying requirements. It seems a bit far-fetched to expect that you only have to write the software once without having to maintain it.
This has been a topic brought up internally at Apple many times over the past decade. Glad to see it finally moving forward. Although I see the benefits to having a system-version of these packages.. if you're doing anything serious for production then the environment should be containerized.
Python and pip just being there is a huge advantage for newbies. I really think that part of programming is constantly ignored because all the decision-makers are not newbies.
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Learning how to install Python and Pip should be part of the learning process for newbies.
Learning how to install and configure development environments is an important skill in general, but I'm not convinced having those skills as a prerequisite for exploring programming as a newbie is at all valuable.
(As RMS wrote in 1983, "Unix is not my ideal system, but it is not too bad. The essential features of Unix seem to be good ones, and I think I can fill in what Unix lacks without spoiling them. And a system compatible with Unix would be convenient for many other people to adopt.")
Whereas such features as "background tasks" were simply a natural consequence of the architecture of Unix, Apple didn't expose that on iOS. Now they've finally gotten around to designing the background task subsystem they really want, and it's not just an emergent property of the generic Unix way. It's built for protecting battery life and privacy. It happens to be built on Unix processes (right?), but that's just an implementation detail for them.
They've been gradually deprecating Unix for 20 years, and designing the OS they want. iOS and its App Store allowed them to kill off large sections of the old interface at once. I fully expect inside of 5 years for all of Apple's operating systems to drop "UNIX" certification and become almost unrecognizable as "Unix". They've got enough market clout now that people will port Ruby/Python/Perl to a non-Unix macOS, just as they port them to Microsoft Windows.
This has been a topic brought up internally at Apple many times over the past decade. Glad to see it finally moving forward. Although I see the benefits to having a system-version of these packages.. if you're doing anything serious for production then the environment should be containerized.
Does OSX offer reasonable container technology? chroot?
All the interesting container stuff is on other platforms.
It might be out of fear, maybe because apple doesn't want macos to be virtualized.
It would be really nice to have say the current xcode in one container and a dev xcode in another. It would be nice to farm work out to a lot of machines.
or a dockerfile like: FROM macos:10.14
RUN installer xcode... RUN xcode-build myproject
So, what's the point of using Macs as a better Linux, if they are continuing to strip out the parts of Linux that are useful? Might as well use WSL or Cygwin and save a bunch of money.
With brew as the de-facto package manager for macOS this is a great move. Having Python and Ruby bundled with macOS is confusing when trying to install "regular" versions of the software through brew or other methods. Because the default installation can't updated without updating the OS, the system versions are not useful for most developers.
The down side to that is that ruby is currently required to install Homebrew.
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MacPorts has or had semi-official status. It was hosted by macOS Forge, which was an official Apple site that included other projects such as XQuartz. I'm unclear on the current status.
That isn’t semi-official. I know of not one ruby dev at Apple that uses MacPorts. That’s not to say there isn’t one, but they are rare.