Again the word "serious" is there telling me people are absolutely aloof to the kinds of new developers there are and what it's like to be a non programmer.
They previously deprecated Java runtime for similar reasons. And I can’t really blame them, roadmap is crystal clear now, they prefer to assign ressources to develop Swift/Swift UI and improve tooling for native code development.
Mind, there's still a command line and shell built-in, which I consider far more important.
I'm generally against bloating simple apps, but you'd never see this unless you opened a .py file (or .sh, .rb, etc), and if you open a .py file, you probably want syntax highlighting.
No? Oh well, I guess programming is hard, IT was right. Ok, back to excel...
You'd have to be very bored and unmotivated to not install a programming language if you had even the slightest motivation to program (IOW, not a normie consumer). I understand what you're saying, but I just don't see how this would be a huge barrier to entry.
This feels the same as when Microsoft removed QBasic from Windows 98. So many kids at home missed opportunities to be exposed to programming from them on, until a certain Terminal application appeared in Mac OS X and began to pique young curiosity again (mine included).
zsh/bash/ksh93, tcsh, awk, sqlite3, elisp (assuming emacs survives for now) and javascript console. I don't know why you'd want to limit things to pre-installed command line interpreters though.
> You have the shell itself, but that’s hardly enough to write anything cool.
What kind of cool things do you envision the curious beginner to write, using only the current preinstalled Python/Ruby/perl, that they can't do with the remaining interpreters that I mentioned?
What about the iconic 4th grader "greetings and cool things" script? Here's something like what it looked like for me (on the IBM PC in my classroom):
5 CLS
7 RANDOMIZE TIMER
10 PRINT "Hello there. I'm a computer. What is your name?"
20 INPUT G$
30 PRINT "Hello "+G$+". You are welcome to computer land."
40 PRINT "What would you like to do today?"
50 PRINT "1) Make noises"
60 PRINT "2) Make a maze"
70 PRINT "3) Exit"
80 PRINT "Enter your selection:"
100 INPUT S$
110 IF S$="1" GOTO 200
120 IF S$="2" GOTO 300
130 IF S$="3" GOTO 400
140 PRINT "Try again."
150 GOTO 40
200 SOUND 20+(RND*20000), RND*3
210 GOTO 200
300 SCREEN 1
310 IF RND>.5 THEN PRINT "/"; ELSE PRINT "\";
320 GOTO 310
400 PRINT "Bye."
10 SCREEN 9
20 CLS
30 COLOR 1, INT(RND*10)
40 SOUND 20+(RND*5000),.2
50 GOTO 30
My main gripe with Windows NT was that it would go back to the NT screen saver -- I couldn't get it to stay displaying my program, because there wasn't any true DOS mode.
clear
echo "Hello there. I'm a computer. What's your name?"
read G
echo "Hello $G. You are welcome to computer land."
while true
do
echo ""
echo "What would you like to do today?"
echo "1) Say something random"
echo "2) Make a maze"
echo "3) Exit"
echo "Enter your selection"
read S
if [ "$S" = "1" ]; then
say $( head -n $((7*RANDOM)) /usr/share/dict/words | tail -n 1 )
elif [ "$S" = "2" ]; then
for i in {1..3000}; do
if (($RANDOM>16384)); then printf '/'; else printf '\'; fi
done
elif [ "$S" = "3" ]; then
echo "Bye."
exit
else
echo "Try again."
fi
done
I honestly don't see how a Python or Ruby version would be much better than a shell version for this. Perhaps you can show by example?
I still contend that Ruby and Python are far more accessible than shell scripting, because they are very popular, especially Python, cross-platform, and less arcane.
import os
import random
import sys
os.system("clear")
print "Hello there. I'm a computer. What's your name?"
G = raw_input()
print "Hello " + G + ". You are welcome to computer land."
while True:
print ""
print "What would you like to do today?"
print "1) Say something random"
print "2) Make a maze"
print "3) Exit"
print "Enter your selection"
S = raw_input()
if S == "1":
F = open("/usr/share/dict/words").readlines()
W = random.choice(F)
os.system("say {}".format(W))
elif S == "2":
for i in range(1, 3000):
if random.random()>0.5:
sys.stdout.write("/")
else:
sys.stdout.write("\\")
elif S == "3":
print "Bye."
exit()
else:
print "Try again."
In fact they probably don't even know what "deprecated" means.
It wasn't that long ago that Python 2.7 was the default on the Raspberry Pi. (That may still be true - I haven't checked recently.)
There's a huge ecosystem of Python 2.7 tutorials, introductions, and sample code out there. Very little of it is prefaced with "Of course you should use Python 3 now."
otoh, pointing people towards messing with system python... well, it's a trap. And they will get burned, and it will be a nightmare to straighten out.