Re: [MacPerl] Re: [MacPerl Announcement] MacPerl 5.1.1 released

[Angus McIntyre <angus@pobox.com>]

At 4:53 am +0100 07.01.97, Paul Hoffman wrote:
>At 4:48 AM -0800 1/6/97, Matthias Ulrich Neeracher wrote:
>>If that strategy conforms essentially to the rumors
>>circulating at the moment, I can probably take MacPerl to a quiet spot in my
>>backyard and shoot it.
>Matthias, I *strongly* disagree. I doubt Apple, regardless of their
>"strategy", is going to make it impossible for MacPerl to run on the new
>OS. And given their horrible design process, Apple is unlikely to come up
>with a scripting language that would replace MacPerl for ease of use and
>robustness.

Matthias's point being, presumably, that since NeXT is a UNIX-based OS, a
regular UNIX Perl should run just fine on it, so a Mac-specific version
will be less necessary. I don't think he had in mind Apple producing some
bastardised scripting language of their own ("AppleScript! It reads just
like English! It runs just like glue! Six different ways to say the same
thing, and five out of the six can be relied on to fail mysteriously at
least half of the time - but never the same five!").

Of course, Matthias is probably underestimating Apple's capability to
complicate the OS to the point where even UNIX standards like Perl won't
run. For another thing, I suspect that MacNeXTOS (hmm, sounds like the hero
of some arcane Scottish-Greek drama) will be a long time coming, whatever
Uncle Gil may say. I'd give MacPerl at *least* another two years of useful
life.

Matthias - once you said that you might produce a debugger interface to
MacPerl; would that be a project worth doing on the grounds that it would
be useful in the short term and might be at least partially reusable on the
forthcoming Rhapsody (MacNeXTOS) system?

Some initial details of Apple's strategy ("Follow the gourd! No, follow the
shoe! The gourd! The shoe!"), btw, are available at:

  http://biz.yahoo.com/bin/jump?/prnews/97/01/06/aapl_x000_2.html+aapl+97+01

Amusingly, it uses the phrase 'bug-for-bug compatible with System 7' which,
even for a computer journalist, I find a *little* cynical ... Otherwise,
however, it's quite positive; it sounds vaguely as if Apple may actually
know what they're doing and may have picked the right way to go.

                                            		 A

--
                 angus@pobox.com         http://pobox.com/~angus

  "I am here by the will of the people ... and I           "Metrophage"
   will not leave until I get my raincoat back."          Richard Kadrey