On Oct 17, 2007, at 12:16 PM, Trey Harris wrote:
Perhaps someone with the inside scoop can give some real beef (though I understand that that sort of inside baseball is something Apple strongly discourages). But I suspect it's just a case of marketing types taking a temperature on what's "hot" and making sure the hot things were mentioned repeatedly. Look at the other items on http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html and it certainly looks that way.
I'm not an insider, but that sounds right to me.
Ruby is hot, Perl is not. (Why Python made the cut and not Perl, I'm not sure; I don't think Python's particularly hot anymore. But I don't pretend to understand marketing types.) One shouldn't read engineering decisions into marketing copy--if you've ever had to make purchasing decisions on behalf of a large company, you learn that quickly.
I've mentioned this before, I think. The issue was one of sponsorship. There are Apple engineers who contribute (on their own time) to RubyCocoa and PyObjC. Those engineers stepped forward when management asked who would be willing to sponsor a "foreign" development language, quality-check external contributions and integrate them into Apple's internal build system, etc.
A sponsor did come forward for Perl, shortly after my rant a few months ago. But my life (both personal and professional) has been rather hectic since, and I wasn't able to deliver the goods in time to ship with Leopard. Mea culpa.
This does bring up something I don't think we've dealt with on this list in quite a few years though (when was it that OS X last came with Perl 5.6? Was it Jaguar? I can't recall)--for some period, probably well over a year at least, we'll be dealing with an OS X that does not have the most recent major release of Perl. Time to start working on the FAQ about how to install 5.10 alongside Apple's 5.8, since "how do I get 5.10 on the Mac?" will become a perennial question on this list as soon as 5.10 is released. Maybe somebody can work on an Installer package.
Installing a newer Perl hasn't been a problem for a long time - since Jaguar. The problem back then was that the newer version - at the time, 5.8.0 - tried to install its core modules under /Library/Perl by default, mixing them up with any CPAN modules for 5.6 that had been installed in the same location.
That problem was fixed, in two ways. First, as of 5.8.1, Perl reverted back to using the traditional /usr/local for its default install prefix. And second, Apple added version-specific subdirectories, so even if one were to use a prefix of /usr to install 5.10, its core modules still wouldn't overwrite any of 5.8.8's.
The best thing Apple could do is remove the old article about upgrading Jaguar to 5.8. It was written before 5.8.1 was released, and reflects the /Library/Perl default location of 5.8.0. It's really no longer applicable. But, it's still the first article that comes up at apple.com when you google for "macintosh upgrade perl", so a lot of people still follow its advice, thinking that something at apple.com is authoritative. At the very least, Apple should add "this article is obsolete" in big bold red letters at the top of the page.
(How to install 5.10 *over* Apple's 5.8 may also be a topic to at least discuss
If by "discuss" you mean "strongly discourage", I agree with you. sherm-- Web Hosting by West Virginians, for West Virginians: http://wv-www.net Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
