In a message dated Wed, 17 Oct 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Yes, it does come with Mac::Carbon, and yes there is CamelBones. I just think
that Apple seems to ignore mentioning perl in their fancy marketing
campaigns. I get frustrated by that since there is a misunderstanding about
perl in the marketplace and companies like Apple are in a position to do
something about it.
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.
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.
[snip]
I just had hoped for more publicity for perl from Leopard. I had also hoped
for a new version of perl and Apache 2.0 out of the box. Okay, getting 5.10
into Leopard isn't realistic [....]
No, it's not, as Leopard must be well past freeze at this point, and Red
Hat disastrously demonstrated several years ago what happens when you ship
a pre-release of an important open source tool with a new operating system
release. Better to have old technology than bleeding-edge still subject
to change, when it means that you'll be frozen for years on an alpha or
beta version no one in the community is using.
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.
(How to install 5.10 *over* Apple's 5.8 may also be a topic to at least
discuss--without testing, there's no way of knowing whether that will be
dangerous or not. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that a
Security Update that included a new Perl 5.8 would overwrite a
user-installed 5.10 that was installed over the prior 5.8, would it not?)
Trey
