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macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

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Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would a new programmer want to start with a deprecated language?

Because they don't know it's a deprecated language.

In fact they probably don't even know what "deprecated" means.

It wasn't that long ago that Python 2.7 was the default on the Raspberry Pi. (That may still be true - I haven't checked recently.)

There's a huge ecosystem of Python 2.7 tutorials, introductions, and sample code out there. Very little of it is prefaced with "Of course you should use Python 3 now."

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#302
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Apple be in the wrong simply being opinionated about using Homebrew?

MacPorts is sponsored by Apple, or at least used to be.

MacPorts was originally started as DarwinPorts as part of the OpenDarwin initiative at Apple [1]. Apple continued to sponsor MacPorts by providing hosting of website, repository, and build servers at Mac OS forge [2] until it closed back in 2016. The project then moved to GitHub and their own servers.

[1] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsHistory

[2] https://www.macosforge.org/

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#303
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But macOS uses '/' as a directory separator already. IIRC, HFS actually uses a ':'.

Mac OS versions prior to OS X used ':'. Mac OS X, initially released on 24 March 2001, uses '/', like other Unix-derived systems. Also, like other unices, OS X uses '\n' as the line ending. Prior Mac OSs used '\r' as the line ending. Windows uses '\r\n'.

but in Finder you can use "/" in filenames, and can't use ":". They got swapped if you look on the file from Terminal.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#304
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But macOS uses '/' as a directory separator already. IIRC, HFS actually uses a ':'.

Mac OS versions prior to OS X used ':'. Mac OS X, initially released on 24 March 2001, uses '/', like other Unix-derived systems. Also, like other unices, OS X uses '\n' as the line ending. Prior Mac OSs used '\r' as the line ending. Windows uses '\r\n'.

Similar, HFS+ used to provide the option for case insensitivity. Both things were built in for legacy support reasons during the transition from OS 9 to X, as with Carbon.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#305
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't install Ruby/Python from the App Store

…yet.

and probably ever. It's not the right tool for the job, unless Apple really does some restructuring.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#306
post #76

Not surprising at all. It's become clear that what they've been doing with iOS all along is bootstrapping a new operating system. They started with Unix, not because Unix was optimal for what they wanted to do, but it's what they had and it worked well enough. Copland and Taligent and the rest failed because of Second-System Effect, which Apple was smart enough to avoid. (As RMS wrote in 1983, "Unix is not my ideal s…

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. Ruby on Windows is a nightmare. To be specific, Ruby itself (the core language and core libraries) are pretty good on Windows. Great choice for a scripting language, or whatever else you want to do. But libraries like ActiveRecord, Rails and their myriad dependencies are very ve…

The Windows Subsystem for Linux fixes a lot of these problems, you can even point VS Code at Ubuntu now on Windows and avoid CMD entirely.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#307
post #7

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…

It’s part of why companies like Apple and Microsoft care so much about backwards compat Compared to (former) Microsoft, I don't think Apple spends anywhere near the amount of effort MS does on backwards compatibility. You can create a single .exe that will work on any Windows starting from Windows 95 - nearly 25 years. In that timespan, Apple changed CPU architectures twice, and their OS architecture once. If you're…

32 bit Windows binaries will even run on the ARM version of Windows.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lack of care about API&ABI stability in developer facing open source projects (interpreters, libraries, frameworks, commandline arguments) is still bizarre to me: why make your work hard to use/update? If you're a FOSS developer with limited time and man power (and if you're lucky, limited budget) maintaining backwards compatibility is hard. So hard, that new features and bug fixes might have to take a back sea…

> rebuild their entire systems when new versions of software are released/integrated Yeah, the ability to rebuild the entire system from source whenever you need it has resulted in those communities just not caring about a number of things that really do matter on proprietary systems; it's also part of why Linux doesn't have fat binaries (why bundle multiple architectures together when everybody can just grab or buil…

Thats the reason installing proprietary software on linux used to be a massive pain. The expectation is the distro maintainer packages everything for you but they only do that for things that are open source. This has changed since flatpack was created.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#309
post #288
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just pack a statically compiled Ruby interpreter with Homebrew. Not very complex or novel. Disadvantage: install becomes more bloated (larger size).

Sure, it’s not a hard engineering challenge. However, installation instructions right now are as simple as “run this one-liner on your terminal”. That’ll have to materially change.

Take a look at the installation instructions for the Rust compiler.

https://rustup.rs/

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