Future macOS versions won't bundle any scripting language runtimes

[deanishe]

4 minutes ago, vitor said:

Authors of new open-source native apps tend to target Catalina

 

I guess that makes a kind of sense.

 

8 minutes ago, vitor said:

It’s also common to see “our app is now discontinued, as it will never be updated to 64bit”.

 

Yeah. I wonder how many of my apps are like that… (I know my favourite games are.)

 

I guess I should figure that out today or tomorrow: my 2008 Mac Pro died a week ago

 

So I'm expecting delivery of a shiny, new iMac on Wednesday 🥳

 

I guess I'll hang onto my old boot drive and put a second OS for gaming on there. I wonder if I should install Linux or Windows instead.

[vitor]

1 minute ago, deanishe said:

my 2008 Mac Pro died a week ago

 

Oh no!

 

2 minutes ago, deanishe said:

So I'm expecting delivery of a shiny, new iMac on Wednesday

 

Oh yes!

 

2 minutes ago, deanishe said:

I guess I'll hang onto my old boot drive and put a second OS for gaming on there. I wonder if I should install Linux or Windows instead.

 

If you’re doing it for gaming, might as well go for Windows. There are plenty of Windows-only games, but not really that many good Linux-only games. And the only reason I don’t say “none” is that there was a time when Towerfall was only available on the Ouya, which is Android-based so technically Linux.

[deanishe]

59 minutes ago, vitor said:

If you’re doing it for gaming, might as well go for Windows.

 

Yeah, but I'm not that into gaming, and I've been a *NIX-only guy for 20 years. So it's kind of a stupid principle thing combined with not knowing the OS. And I'm interested to see what a modern Linux desktop looks like (haven't had one since I switched to Mac 15 years ago). I suppose I could get some mileage out of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Apparently, it'll let me install Debian, the one true Linux distro.

 

1 hour ago, vitor said:

Oh yes!

 

I'm sure I'll love it (especially compared to the 11" 2011 MacBook Air I'm currently using), but it is not at all the computer I wish I had. In hindsight, I should have bought a new Mac Pro in 2012. But nobody knew at the time that Apple had already forgotten that Macs are supposed to be, you know, good computers, not just fashion accessories

[Andrew]

I'm using Mojave for Alfred's development, installed on my 2018 Mac Mini.

 

Unfortunately, with the 2020-002 security update, it also did a BridgeOS update on the T2 chip which is causing a kernel panic every time the machine sleeps, or every time I shut it down. Looks like it is a widespread problem across various forums, which doesn't affect Catalina, so Apple don't seem to be in a hurry to fix it.

 

*expletives removed*

[raguay.customct]

9 hours ago, deanishe said:

 

Mojave's probably the sweet spot. It doesn't have all the awful features of Catalina that have crippled so much software, and very few apps are Catalina-only.

 

I upgraded to Catalina because of a program that is Catalina-only. As Catalina gets older, more and more programs will be Catalina-only, especially programs that are just now coming to market. But, I doubt Catalina will get tighter with restrictions (but I could be wrong). So far, my 80+ workflows that I use are running fine in Catalina. IF mac goes banning all scripting, it will be in a future version that most developers will mostly not use and therefore will not make it long.

 

The only programs I lost due to the move were 32-bit programs that the developer no longer supported or have totally dropped (I'm still sad over losing Yummy FTP!).

[vitor]

10 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

As Catalina gets older, more and more programs will be Catalina-only

 

As Catalina gets older, we’re getting closer to whatever comes next and developers will start thinking about targeting that. So less programs will be Catalina-only as 10.16-only becomes the new trend.

 

10 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

especially programs that are just now coming to market.

 

That’s the point we made above. Developers of new apps target whatever is current.

 

10 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

I doubt Catalina will get tighter with restrictions (but I could be wrong).

 

Catalina won’t; it’s too far along. But watch whatever comes next. And watch as Apple starts pushing Shortcuts for macOS and neglecting AppleScript further. Want to add new features to Shortcuts? They’ll only support making those in an Apple language. Want to share what you made with other people? Better cough up $100 a year for a Developer Account. Just like Safari extensions.

 

There’s more than one way to tighten restrictions. The Vista-esque dialogs are just the most obvious.

 

10 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

IF mac goes banning all scripting

 

They’re not going to ban all scripting, and I don’t think anyone is making that point. They’re just not including language runtimes by default. Swift itself can be used for scripting.

 

10 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

it will be in a future version that most developers will mostly not use

 

Most developers keep complaining of Catalina, and it’s still trudging along with no sign of reversals. Developers will use whatever their paying customers are on, and customers are on the latest version of the OS. Developers that give away apps for free don’t register in their radar.

 

10 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

and therefore will not make it long.

 

Yes, it will. Tim Cook is an awful steward for Apple in terms of the quality we value, but financially he’s a money-pinching two-timing wizard¹. For years they kept releasing nigh-unusable machines (butterfly keyboard) and people kept buying them and profits kept rising. To a money person, that means success and that they’re doing things right.

Developers have been complaining for years of different facets of Apple, and they keep doing whatever they want. Whenever they do what we want it’s not because we asked for it, it’s because what we asked for aligns what they wanted to do.

 

10 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

The only programs I lost due to the move were 32-bit programs that the developer no longer supported or have totally dropped

 

Which is fine for you, but that’s not the general reality. For one, no gamer is happy (not the same as acceptance), and as someone who deals with third-party apps everyday, I can conclusively say some developers discontinued their apps because of Catalina, not despite it.

---

1. I liked him when he took over and had great hopes for the Cook-Ive-Federighi trifecta, but Cook has been showing his ideals and humanitarian values (including hammering on the right to privacy) only extend so far as he can extract profits from that rhetoric.

[deanishe]

5 hours ago, vitor said:

For years they kept releasing nigh-unusable machines (butterfly keyboard)

 

I still can't believe they kept making machines with those completely broken keyboards for years.

 

5 hours ago, vitor said:

Developers have been complaining for years of different facets of Apple, and they keep doing whatever they want.

 

It took them many years, but they did eventually 'fess up to having neglected developers and released the new Mac Pro, which is one hell of a machine. It has somewhat renewed my hope in Apple getting back on track with the Mac. It was the first machine after Ive stepped back from the Mac, so it gives me hope that the people who have taken over understand that being pretty doesn't matter if a computer isn't also good at doing computer stuff.

 

macOS is still going full-steam in a bad direction, though.

[vitor]

2 hours ago, deanishe said:

It took them many years, but they did eventually 'fess up to having neglected developers and released the new Mac Pro, which is one hell of a machine.

 

But it’s also prohibitively expensive for most and they still nickel and dime you ($400 wheels, $1000 stand sold separate from the monitor). Developers may have been the most vocal in asking for a new Mac Pro, but I don’t think they’re going to be their biggest buyers. Movie studios is more likely, which was supposed to be a major audience for them with the trashcan model until they realised they’ve “painted [themselves] into a thermal corner” (making the “can’t innovate anymore, my ass” a bit of a joke).

Now they’ve fixed those problems and can sell it to the market they intended (decoding three 8K streams at the same time and the quality of the new display aren’t developer features), but it turned out that the best machine they could make is the one developers had been asking for (and thinking about and openly discussing) for years, so now they can say “look, we listened!”.

Maybe I’m being cynical, but I’ve started by rooting for and defending Tim Cook, and over time I’ve come to distrust his commitment to what he says is in “Apple’s DNA”. When I saw his recent video about the face masks I’ve realised I’ve never even seen him speak like a normal person—even at home addressing a crisis he speaks like a marketer (just reminded myself of Bill Hicks, though I bear no ill will towards Cook, I’d just like for him to pass the baton).

 

2 hours ago, deanishe said:

macOS is still going full-steam in a bad direction, though.

 

Have you noticed how long it’s been since they’ve uttered the words “it just works”?

[politicus]

Thank you all for your feedback! 

 

I think I will go for Mojave, while Catalina is supported on my MacBook. 

Hope I will have less problems with 32-bits applications doing that way.

 

If you have any application compatibility question, roaringapps.com is a great place to visit.

Edited May 12, 2020 by politicus

[dfay]

seems ok in BS dev 1

 

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/are-the-scripting-languages-really-gone.2242387/post-28592374

[andreas.w]

I installed macOS Big Sur Developer Beta 1 on a secondary partition to try it out, and one unexpected thing I found out by doing that is that PHP is now marked with information that it will be removed in a future version of macOS.

 

When I run "php --version" in Big Sur Dev Beta 1 I get:

WARNING: PHP is not recommended

PHP is included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software.

Future versions of macOS will not include PHP.

PHP 7.3.17-(to be removed in future macOS) (cli) (built: Jun 6 2020 07:41:43) ( NTS )

Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group

Zend Engine v3.3.17, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

 

Running the same command in Catalina gives me the following (so the message above is new in Big Sur)

PHP 7.3.11 (cli) (built: Apr 17 2020 19:14:14) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.11, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

 

I guess that there is some official information about this from Apple somewhere too that I could not find, but having this disclaimer in the version information in the actual software seems official enough to me though.

 

I thought this might be interesting for you all to know about, as many Alfred Workflows are using PHP.

We will obviously be able to install PHP ourselves manually even after it isn't included out of the box anymore, which itself could take years (and I guess it could be included in Alfred itself to minimize the impact when it is actually removed), but it might be a good idea to not create new workflows in PHP anymore, and maybe think about rewriting existing ones in, for example, Python instead. (I will probably rewrite my Raindrop.io workflow in Python at som point because of this)

[deanishe]

39 minutes ago, andreas.w said:

maybe think about rewriting existing ones in, for example, Python instead

 

It's not just PHP that's being removed. See the existing thread:

 

 

[andreas.w]

@deanishe Thanks for the link to that thread!

 

It all seams to be a mess really.

- The Catalina Beta release notes said at some point that all the scripting languages will be removed eventually, but there where nothing that indicated that in the actual OS

- Big Sur Beta does not say anything about that in the release notes (not that I could find anyway), and all scripting languages are still there

- PHP's and Python 2's version info in Big Sur says that they will be removed in a future version (which they didn't do in Catalina)

- Python 3 wasn't even there before Big Sur, so it was added right now, and does not say anything about being deprecated, so it would look like that would stay then I guess?

 

Seems to me like Apple might have changed there minds to not actually remove all scripting languages anyway, but only some of them that in their minds doesn't fit in a desktop OS for some reason, which would be PHP and maybe something else, and then of course Python 2 that is more obvious to remove as it is end of life now, and seems to rather finally be on it's way to be replaced by Python 3 even in macOS. (You still get Python 2 when you run the python command without any version number in the command though, in Big Sur Beta 1)

[deanishe]

17 minutes ago, andreas.w said:

Thanks for the link to that thread!

 

I've merged your thread with that (now this) one. Better to keep the discussion in one place.