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Dan
Dan

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MacOS won’t be shipped with scripting languages in the future. (Python/Ruby/Perl/etc)

I just saw this article. I’m just passing this along in case you didn’t know like me. I recommend reading that article but the short and sweet version is that MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) has depreciations and 10.16 will not be shipped with scripting languages.

As they've quoted in the article, I'll share the important part from the MacOS 10.15 beta release notes:

Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include scripting language runtimes by default, and might require you to install additional packages. If your software depends on scripting languages, it’s recommended that you bundle the runtime within the app. (49764202)

Use of Python 2.7 isn’t recommended as this version is included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include Python 2.7. Instead, it’s recommended that you run python3 from within Terminal. (51097165)

I was a little shocked to see this but then also not shocked at the same time.

Any thoughts?

Top comments (7)

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rpalo profile image
Ryan Palo

I'm actually kind of happy, because it gets rid of all of the "Don't mess up the system Python/Ruby, or else!" pain. If you run python, you know it's a python you want, and not an accidental system one.

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cookrdan profile image
Dan

Yes, exactly! I am also glad about this! I’m more comfortable with installing things and managing stuff via terminal now but not a long time ago I was intimidated about changing anything because it seemed like I could break my system or something.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Yeah, me too! They are probably using Swift for everything now and don't need the Python/Perl/Ruby runtimes anymore.

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dhandspikerwade profile image
Devin Handspiker-Wade

Not how much this will affect people. A lot of the runtimes bundled in OSX are so far out-of-date that most people (or Devs at least) end up installing a newer version with the rest of their applications anyway.

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cookrdan profile image
Dan

Yeah I agree. I was wondering the other day after I saw that the default shell will be zsh if they'd ever get rid of old Python and here it is.

Probably there's a lot of old Python code still being used. I remember even 3-4 years ago reading things that still suggested to using Python 2.7 rather than 3.x. I don't know about other languages though.

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dhandspikerwade profile image
Devin Handspiker-Wade

There's probably going to be a fair amount of blog posts that no longer work; those "paste this into Terminal" type of post. There's a lot of snippets assuming that the tools are there.

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cookrdan profile image
Dan