Hacker News Reader

Comment by culopatin | Hacker News Reader

Is it available in windows by default?

No, but then neither is perl. On windows you've got powershell, batch, VBScript and JScript pre-installed.

Is perl? That's an honest question/honestly surprises me.

But honestly installing anything like that (without WSL probably - haven't used it recently) on Windows is painful, it's not python's fault, it's just a different paradigm. Run with a different environment variable for example.

Last install of Windows 11 I did (triggering) Perl was installed by default

It is not installed by default on any of the systems I work with. We have around 10 office staff that all use windows, and 2 windows servers. No Perl by default on any of them.

To the best of my knowledge you must install one of two main distributions of Perl for Windows. https://www.perl.com/article/downloading-and-installing-perl...

You can also use WSL.

Edit: It sounds like, from other comments, that Perl comes with Git Bash as well.

Are you sure it is "installed by default" or it happens to be inside WSL? Because WSL is not the default.

I believe not now but Perl 5.004 was installed on Window NT (3.5 or 4) by default. That made the case for its use on project that could not afford the IBM AIX or Silicon Graphics systems we were using at the time.

We used Netscape Fasttrack as the server.

Wait what no?! NT4 was released in 1996. And Microsoft touching Open Source without ten foot poles back then also feels wrong.

Perl was used as part of the Windows XP build process, if you know where to look. It might have been used in NT4 as well.

Sure, but it's not "installed by default" in either of them.

I wonder if that was ever considered as a possibility at Microsoft. They had proven the camel was capable with Win32 stuff in their build process.

Maybe it was considered technically by some of the programmers, but swiftly quieted by PMs.

I'm sorry but my windows doesn't have Perl by default either perhaps I misunderstood your comment :)

You probably have it if you have Git Bash installed. Perl is a dependency of Git IIRC.

Then it's not by default right? I must have git installed !

The first versions of git were written in Perl (with some small speed sensitive parts written in C).

It was a simple question. Author claimed it’s found everywhere, but if it’s not installed by default im not going to find it in enterprise environments

Eugh, no, they've just got a little thing so you'll go to the microsoft store to download python when you search for it from the start menu, seem to recall it giving me some cryptic hell with making pip difficult to find. Bastards.

Is Perl?

No, but Perl at the very least is available on the latest versions of Mac OS. Python is not. So as far as "being bundled with the latest OSes" goes, Perl beats Python.

NOTE: I am (probably mistakenly) assuming that Perl is still bundled in most Linux distros by default.

Python is available by default in macOS. Not latest version python, but available. (Both 2 & 3 I think, or maybe they've dropped 2 now.)

A minor update of macOS Monterey[1] removed /usr/bin/python, but /usr/bin/perl still exists. Xcode's Command Line Tools will install Python 3, but I do not count as being bundled by default with macOS. Unfortunately, I can't find any Apple documentation to prove this. You'll just have to check with a fresh install of macOS Ventura yourself (or, at your own risk, uninstall Xcode and/or the Command Line Tools)

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

(Ouch, a minor update!) Oh ok, I stand corrected. I don't currently have any macOS machines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com