I thought it was common knowledge that you should not rely on system provided Python, Ruby, Tcl etc. They are there for scripting the system and nothing else.

I thought it was common knowledge that you should not rely on system provided Python, Ruby, Tcl etc. They are there for scripting the system and nothing else. If you are Python developer, install specific version your project needs and use that. Same for any other language. Not sure what you mean by outdated compiler? For what? C, C++ etc are distributed with Xcode and clang is usually standard compliant and recent. BASH is the only problem. Newer BASH versions switched to GPL v3 and Apple will never upgrade to that. My personal solution for that is to disable system integrity protection, build latest bash and install in /bin. This way most scripts that have #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash and rely on new BASH features just work.