11 ms·

Not surprising at all. It's become clear that what they've been doing with iOS all along is bootstrapping a new operating system. They started with Unix, not

by ken 7y ago

Not surprising at all. It's become clear that what they've been doing with iOS all along is bootstrapping a new operating system. They started with Unix, not because Unix was optimal for what they wanted to do, but it's what they had and it worked well enough. Copland and Taligent and the rest failed because of Second-System Effect, which Apple was smart enough to avoid. (As RMS wrote in 1983, "Unix is not my ideal system, but it is not too bad. The essential features of Unix seem to be good ones, and I think I can fill in what Unix lacks without spoiling them. And a system compatible with Unix would be convenient for many other people to adopt.") Whereas such features as "background tasks" were simply a natural consequence of the architecture of Unix, Apple didn't expose that on iOS. Now they've finally gotten around to designing the background task subsystem they really want, and it's not just an emergent property of the generic Unix way. It's built for protecting battery life and privacy. It happens to be built on Unix processes (right?), but that's just an implementation detail for them. They've been gradually deprecating Unix for 20 years, and designing the OS they want. iOS and its App Store allowed them to kill off large sections of the old interface at once. I fully expect inside of 5 years for all of Apple's operating systems to drop "UNIX" certification and become almost unrecognizable as "Unix". They've got enough market clout now that people will port Ruby/Python/Perl to a non-Unix macOS, just as they port them to Microsoft Windows.

drivingmenuts 7y ago
A different solution, and possibly better, would be to run Unix/Linux in a VM rather than worrying about it being native in the system. If I'm not mistaken, current best practice is to somewhat isolate third-party developer software anyway, using homebrew, a VM or other solutions (not sure about Docker - don't use it). I can see where it would be an issue with developing for MacOS or iOS, but third-party web development doesn't really need anything that is installed on the system, and in my experience, it's actually better not to base it on the MacOS default packages.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Homebrew installs its own binaries in a way that they won't interfere with the macOS-supplied versions. It doesn't use a container or anything like that. Certainly not a full-on VM. Maybe I'm old-fashioned (feels weird to say that as a 25-year-old, but here we are), but I quite like not having everything be in a container all the time.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Homebrew installs its own binaries in a way that they won't interfere with the macOS-supplied versions Correction: Homebrew usually installs its binaries in a way that doesn't interfere with the ones provided with the system. It will occasionally override or shadow them and things will break.
    - toyg 7y ago
      > It will occasionally override or shadow them That's extremely rare, these days. When a conflict is possible, they just drop the new version in the cellar and tell you what to do if you really want to risk shooting yourself in the foot.
- zerkten 7y ago
  > A different solution, and possibly better, would be to run Unix/Linux in a VM rather than worrying about it being native in the system. Just like WSL 2.0 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/)?
thristian 7y ago
> ...just as they port them to Microsoft Windows. Just as they ported them to MacOS Classic back in the day.
rgovostes 7y ago
I'm sure that others here are well familiar with other officially certified UNIX operating systems[1], but given many widely used Unix-like systems not on the list, I don't think Apple gains anything from the certification. Moreover, it probably is deleterious, forcing them to adhere to system designs that made sense in the 70s and 80s. 1: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I'd be surprised if Apple spends all that much money/effort on official Unix certification, precisely because I doubt Apple would bother. How many customers are choosing macOS over something else because of the Unix certification? In a world where Linux exists? (This discussion, of course, has nothing to do with whether or not macOS adheres to Unix principles or compatibility.)
  - bumblebritches5 7y ago
    I mean, you're straight up incorrect. Apple has been officially UNIX '03 certified for over 10 years now. Why you'e trying to argue against facts that are just a single search away, I don't know.
JohnBooty 7y ago
They've got enough market clout now that people will port Ruby/Python/Perl to a non-Unix macOS, just as they port them to Microsoft Windows. Ruby on Windows is a nightmare. To be specific, Ruby itself (the core language and core libraries) are pretty good on Windows. Great choice for a scripting language, or whatever else you want to do. But libraries like ActiveRecord, Rails and their myriad dependencies are very very hit or miss on Windows and there's not a lot of support when things go badly. A lot of the issues are simple - like dead simple. Lot of gem authors don't bother to make things like file paths (forward slash vs. backslash) system agnostic. Or the gems depend on compiled binary stuff like Nokogiri or ImageMagick and those are always a bit of an adventure on Windows. If MacOS drifts farther away from Unix they will cease to be the platform of choice for many developers currently using it today.
- tty2300 7y ago
  The funny thing is I have been a rails dev for years and didn't even know it didn't work on windows because I have never tried and don't know any dev ever using windows.
  - taf2 7y ago
    In the early days of rails say 2006, it was definitely more common place... but I guess there were fewer of us back then ... I know as a maintainer of curb I have a few windows users
    - malyk 7y ago
      I started with a ruby/rails project in 2007 and after 3 days of fighting my work issued windows machine I just went out and bought a white macbook and things were up in running in an hour or two. I've never looked back.
  - kowdermeister 7y ago
    That just proves you live in a bubble :) I never got into RoR because it sucked so much on windows and every single tutorial was OSX focused. I just sticked to alternatives that worked.
Gaelan 7y ago
I think you’re overthinking this. The vast majority of Ruby/Python programmers have been installing their own copies themselves, because Apple was pretty slow in updating them (Ruby is usually a few minor releases behind, Python is still 2.7 IIRC). People will just keep doing that, and nothing will change. They may or may not be moving off Unix, but this isn’t evidence of that.
- indigo747 7y ago
  As a counter-anecdote, the built in Ruby interpreter in Mac OS X Tiger was the way I learned to program and how I got interested in programming. I don't think a bare Ruby interpreter is the best way to get into programming, but Apple hasn't been great at encouraging programming among kids. As a kid, its development tools were totally baffling, where Ruby was much easier to understand.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    > Apple hasn't been great at encouraging programming among kids You should check out what they’ve been doing for years with Swift Playgrounds on the iPad
    - bnt 7y ago
      But that's teaching a new generation of coders a set of tools designed only for Apple. Ruby (Python etc) are open and easily available on other platforms, Swift may be in the future but it isn't now.
      - ash_gti 7y ago
        How about using a web browser with JavaScript? Maybe not the best language for someone new but its widely available.
        gridlockd 7y ago
        How about just a web browser? You can run almost any language from a web browser these days: https://repl.it/languages/ https://repl.it/languages/ A lot of educational sites offer embedded interpreters like this. It has never been easier to start to learn programming. The real challenge nowadays is maintaining attention...
jpz 7y ago
The main issue here is that they don't want the hassle and responsibility of breaking everyone's software each time they release a new system-level python. They have a problem deprecating python2.7 as it is, the smartest deprecation is not to release a python3+ version at all. You see a similar issue with python on Debian. Python 2.7 is still the system python for all of the Debian tree, and it is very challenging to migrate to a new version because of the huge impact it has. That's not to say MacOS won't be a place where python is happy to run - just that Apple don't want to dictate a specific version of it in their releases (i.e. developers/users/applications should install one.)
jypepin 7y ago
One good thing about programming on Mac is the UNIX environment which basically works just like on Linux. Makes it great for finding questions/solutions that work (vs on Windows for example). Do you see that changing as macOS gets away from UNIX? That would probably be a bad hit on apple if Linux becomes then the de facto programming OS when Apple drops UNIX
- a-ogilvie 7y ago
  What makes you think Apple has any plans to move away from Unix?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    The alarmist first comment in this very thread...
  - jypepin 7y ago
    from the comment I am answering to > They've been gradually deprecating Unix for 20 years, and designing the OS they want.
- toyg 7y ago
  > if Linux becomes then the de facto programming OS It is already. Deployed any production service on macOS, of late? Windows and MacOS both, are now forced to run Linux compatibility layers (Docker, WSL...); the Mac one just happens to be thinner because of the choices made at NeXT back in the day.
pmarin 7y ago
Ruby/Python/Perl is not UNIX.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
I don't see this anti-Unix stance at all in what Apple is doing here. The "P"-languages that shall not be named were never part of Unix/POSIX, and arguably violate Unix principles in that they want to establish a language-centric ecosystem when the Unix userland is about small, language-agnostic programs working together.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >and arguably violate Unix principles in that they want to establish a language-centric ecosystem when the Unix userland is about small, language-agnostic programs working together. That was never a real consideration where distros/vendors are concerned (UNIX or Linux). Just a nice-to-have goal for the command line userland (and even that, more back in the day).
simonh 7y ago
Would you say that RedHat doing almost the exact same thing[1] means they are moving away from being Unix-like as well? This is just an idea who's time has come. You might be right about OSX and it's derivatives moving away from being so unix-like, but by itself this is just sensible housekeeping they would have to do at some point anyway. It's just not reasonable to expect them to include and maintain deprecated language runtimes indefinitely. [1]https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/05/07/what-no-python-in-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/05/07/what-no-python...
0xCMP 7y ago
So is google with chrome os first and then with fuchsia
t0astbread 7y ago
Weird, I thought the Unix-likeness was a huge selling point of macOS ("the most user-friendly Unix on the market")
- agumonkey 7y ago
  for the tech crowd that's for sure, but how much is it for their overall market ?
  - silversconfused 7y ago
    The jump from os 9 to OSX was about as significant as the jump from win9x to the NT based XP. Suddenly, multitasking stability without a huge dollop of luck was a reasonable expectation.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> (As RMS wrote in 1983, "Unix is not my ideal system, but it is not too bad. The essential features of Unix seem to be good ones, and I think I can fill in what Unix lacks without spoiling them. And a system compatible with Unix would be convenient for many other people to adopt.") I have a historical question and I wonder if anyone in this thread has the answer: why did RMS (and, presumably, by then his cycle) had to wait around for Linus Torwalds to write a kernel so they could have one for GNU? RMS in particular has a reputation as a legendary hacker. Was he not able to write his own kernel?
- bitL 7y ago
  There is GNU/HURD that was supposed to be the kernel. However, its development hit roadblock when microkernel design ended up extremely difficult to debug. Sometimes you can't predict real complexity from the architectural drawing board and prevailing hype in academia, pointing to microkernels as the future at that time. Linus just wanted to implement his own, simple UNIX kernel, based off proven principles, without doing original kernel research.
- megous 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd
- NoOn3 7y ago
  They tried it's GNU Hurd.
- e12e 7y ago
  In addition to sibling comments, remember that Linus announced Linux as: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. (...)" GNU couldn't use MINIX due to the license (unlike minix 3), and as I recall, the bsd's were also in somewhat unclear license terms. Gnu made the libc, compiler and various userland tools - but no-one did a" simple get it working"-kind of kernel, and then Linux came along. I suppose part of this might be because in early gnu days, most gnu hackers used university Unix machines - not personal 80x86 for development. If you bough sun hw you got Solaris. Only if you bought a pc clone would you be wanting a "real" os...
knolan 7y ago
I disagree. MacOS is hugely popular in academia. A significant amount of researchers use MacBooks as it allows them to have the best of both worlds by having a machine that runs MS Office for preparing proposals and dealing with Admin as well as a UNIX system that lets them ssh into whatever workstation or cluster they’re running jobs on. Sure Windows is catching up in this regard but MacOS has had the advantage of being a much nicer experience. Getting your products into Universities is a great way to maintain market share. This is true for software like Matlab and even for banks where most students will keep banking with the same bank for decades.
- znpy 7y ago
  This. I've asked a macbook at work specifically for this. I can have an Unix workstation while still being able to run Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. I don't want to use Windows and I don't want to use that pile of crap that LibreOffice is... The mac was a good compromise for me.
Geezus42 7y ago
I would like to believe that the people who use those features would make the much simpler switch to Linux but with the new WSL and (ridiculous) terminal I know a lot of them will be persuaded to transition into the special hell that is Windows.

by ken 7y ago

drivingmenuts 7y ago

A different solution, and possibly better, would be to run Unix/Linux in a VM rather than worrying about it being native in the system. If I'm not mistaken, current best practice is to somewhat isolate third-party developer software anyway, using homebrew, a VM or other solutions (not sure about Docker - don't use it). I can see where it would be an issue with developing for MacOS or iOS, but third-party web development doesn't really need anything that is installed on the system, and in my experience, it's actually better not to base it on the MacOS default packages.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Homebrew installs its own binaries in a way that they won't interfere with the macOS-supplied versions. It doesn't use a container or anything like that. Certainly not a full-on VM. Maybe I'm old-fashioned (feels weird to say that as a 25-year-old, but here we are), but I quite like not having everything be in a container all the time.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Homebrew installs its own binaries in a way that they won't interfere with the macOS-supplied versions Correction: Homebrew usually installs its binaries in a way that doesn't interfere with the ones provided with the system. It will occasionally override or shadow them and things will break.
  - toyg 7y ago
    > It will occasionally override or shadow them That's extremely rare, these days. When a conflict is possible, they just drop the new version in the cellar and tell you what to do if you really want to risk shooting yourself in the foot.
zerkten 7y ago
> A different solution, and possibly better, would be to run Unix/Linux in a VM rather than worrying about it being native in the system. Just like WSL 2.0 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/)?

thristian 7y ago

> ...just as they port them to Microsoft Windows. Just as they ported them to MacOS Classic back in the day.

rgovostes 7y ago

I'm sure that others here are well familiar with other officially certified UNIX operating systems[1], but given many widely used Unix-like systems not on the list, I don't think Apple gains anything from the certification. Moreover, it probably is deleterious, forcing them to adhere to system designs that made sense in the 70s and 80s. 1: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
I'd be surprised if Apple spends all that much money/effort on official Unix certification, precisely because I doubt Apple would bother. How many customers are choosing macOS over something else because of the Unix certification? In a world where Linux exists? (This discussion, of course, has nothing to do with whether or not macOS adheres to Unix principles or compatibility.)
- bumblebritches5 7y ago
  I mean, you're straight up incorrect. Apple has been officially UNIX '03 certified for over 10 years now. Why you'e trying to argue against facts that are just a single search away, I don't know.

JohnBooty 7y ago

They've got enough market clout now that people will port Ruby/Python/Perl to a non-Unix macOS, just as they port them to Microsoft Windows. Ruby on Windows is a nightmare. To be specific, Ruby itself (the core language and core libraries) are pretty good on Windows. Great choice for a scripting language, or whatever else you want to do. But libraries like ActiveRecord, Rails and their myriad dependencies are very very hit or miss on Windows and there's not a lot of support when things go badly. A lot of the issues are simple - like dead simple. Lot of gem authors don't bother to make things like file paths (forward slash vs. backslash) system agnostic. Or the gems depend on compiled binary stuff like Nokogiri or ImageMagick and those are always a bit of an adventure on Windows. If MacOS drifts farther away from Unix they will cease to be the platform of choice for many developers currently using it today.

tty2300 7y ago
The funny thing is I have been a rails dev for years and didn't even know it didn't work on windows because I have never tried and don't know any dev ever using windows.
- taf2 7y ago
  In the early days of rails say 2006, it was definitely more common place... but I guess there were fewer of us back then ... I know as a maintainer of curb I have a few windows users
  - malyk 7y ago
    I started with a ruby/rails project in 2007 and after 3 days of fighting my work issued windows machine I just went out and bought a white macbook and things were up in running in an hour or two. I've never looked back.
- kowdermeister 7y ago
  That just proves you live in a bubble :) I never got into RoR because it sucked so much on windows and every single tutorial was OSX focused. I just sticked to alternatives that worked.

Gaelan 7y ago

I think you’re overthinking this. The vast majority of Ruby/Python programmers have been installing their own copies themselves, because Apple was pretty slow in updating them (Ruby is usually a few minor releases behind, Python is still 2.7 IIRC). People will just keep doing that, and nothing will change. They may or may not be moving off Unix, but this isn’t evidence of that.

indigo747 7y ago
As a counter-anecdote, the built in Ruby interpreter in Mac OS X Tiger was the way I learned to program and how I got interested in programming. I don't think a bare Ruby interpreter is the best way to get into programming, but Apple hasn't been great at encouraging programming among kids. As a kid, its development tools were totally baffling, where Ruby was much easier to understand.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  > Apple hasn't been great at encouraging programming among kids You should check out what they’ve been doing for years with Swift Playgrounds on the iPad
  - bnt 7y ago
    But that's teaching a new generation of coders a set of tools designed only for Apple. Ruby (Python etc) are open and easily available on other platforms, Swift may be in the future but it isn't now.
    - ash_gti 7y ago
      How about using a web browser with JavaScript? Maybe not the best language for someone new but its widely available.
      - gridlockd 7y ago
        How about just a web browser? You can run almost any language from a web browser these days: https://repl.it/languages/ https://repl.it/languages/ A lot of educational sites offer embedded interpreters like this. It has never been easier to start to learn programming. The real challenge nowadays is maintaining attention...

jpz 7y ago

The main issue here is that they don't want the hassle and responsibility of breaking everyone's software each time they release a new system-level python. They have a problem deprecating python2.7 as it is, the smartest deprecation is not to release a python3+ version at all. You see a similar issue with python on Debian. Python 2.7 is still the system python for all of the Debian tree, and it is very challenging to migrate to a new version because of the huge impact it has. That's not to say MacOS won't be a place where python is happy to run - just that Apple don't want to dictate a specific version of it in their releases (i.e. developers/users/applications should install one.)

jypepin 7y ago

One good thing about programming on Mac is the UNIX environment which basically works just like on Linux. Makes it great for finding questions/solutions that work (vs on Windows for example). Do you see that changing as macOS gets away from UNIX? That would probably be a bad hit on apple if Linux becomes then the de facto programming OS when Apple drops UNIX

a-ogilvie 7y ago
What makes you think Apple has any plans to move away from Unix?
- coldtea 7y ago
  The alarmist first comment in this very thread...
- jypepin 7y ago
  from the comment I am answering to > They've been gradually deprecating Unix for 20 years, and designing the OS they want.
toyg 7y ago
> if Linux becomes then the de facto programming OS It is already. Deployed any production service on macOS, of late? Windows and MacOS both, are now forced to run Linux compatibility layers (Docker, WSL...); the Mac one just happens to be thinner because of the choices made at NeXT back in the day.

pmarin 7y ago

Ruby/Python/Perl is not UNIX.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

I don't see this anti-Unix stance at all in what Apple is doing here. The "P"-languages that shall not be named were never part of Unix/POSIX, and arguably violate Unix principles in that they want to establish a language-centric ecosystem when the Unix userland is about small, language-agnostic programs working together.

coldtea 7y ago
>and arguably violate Unix principles in that they want to establish a language-centric ecosystem when the Unix userland is about small, language-agnostic programs working together. That was never a real consideration where distros/vendors are concerned (UNIX or Linux). Just a nice-to-have goal for the command line userland (and even that, more back in the day).

simonh 7y ago

Would you say that RedHat doing almost the exact same thing[1] means they are moving away from being Unix-like as well? This is just an idea who's time has come. You might be right about OSX and it's derivatives moving away from being so unix-like, but by itself this is just sensible housekeeping they would have to do at some point anyway. It's just not reasonable to expect them to include and maintain deprecated language runtimes indefinitely. [1]https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/05/07/what-no-python-in-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/05/07/what-no-python...

0xCMP 7y ago

So is google with chrome os first and then with fuchsia

t0astbread 7y ago

Weird, I thought the Unix-likeness was a huge selling point of macOS ("the most user-friendly Unix on the market")

agumonkey 7y ago
for the tech crowd that's for sure, but how much is it for their overall market ?
- silversconfused 7y ago
  The jump from os 9 to OSX was about as significant as the jump from win9x to the NT based XP. Suddenly, multitasking stability without a huge dollop of luck was a reasonable expectation.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> (As RMS wrote in 1983, "Unix is not my ideal system, but it is not too bad. The essential features of Unix seem to be good ones, and I think I can fill in what Unix lacks without spoiling them. And a system compatible with Unix would be convenient for many other people to adopt.") I have a historical question and I wonder if anyone in this thread has the answer: why did RMS (and, presumably, by then his cycle) had to wait around for Linus Torwalds to write a kernel so they could have one for GNU? RMS in particular has a reputation as a legendary hacker. Was he not able to write his own kernel?

bitL 7y ago
There is GNU/HURD that was supposed to be the kernel. However, its development hit roadblock when microkernel design ended up extremely difficult to debug. Sometimes you can't predict real complexity from the architectural drawing board and prevailing hype in academia, pointing to microkernels as the future at that time. Linus just wanted to implement his own, simple UNIX kernel, based off proven principles, without doing original kernel research.
megous 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd
NoOn3 7y ago
They tried it's GNU Hurd.
e12e 7y ago
In addition to sibling comments, remember that Linus announced Linux as: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. (...)" GNU couldn't use MINIX due to the license (unlike minix 3), and as I recall, the bsd's were also in somewhat unclear license terms. Gnu made the libc, compiler and various userland tools - but no-one did a" simple get it working"-kind of kernel, and then Linux came along. I suppose part of this might be because in early gnu days, most gnu hackers used university Unix machines - not personal 80x86 for development. If you bough sun hw you got Solaris. Only if you bought a pc clone would you be wanting a "real" os...

knolan 7y ago

I disagree. MacOS is hugely popular in academia. A significant amount of researchers use MacBooks as it allows them to have the best of both worlds by having a machine that runs MS Office for preparing proposals and dealing with Admin as well as a UNIX system that lets them ssh into whatever workstation or cluster they’re running jobs on. Sure Windows is catching up in this regard but MacOS has had the advantage of being a much nicer experience. Getting your products into Universities is a great way to maintain market share. This is true for software like Matlab and even for banks where most students will keep banking with the same bank for decades.

znpy 7y ago
This. I've asked a macbook at work specifically for this. I can have an Unix workstation while still being able to run Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. I don't want to use Windows and I don't want to use that pile of crap that LibreOffice is... The mac was a good compromise for me.

Geezus42 7y ago

I would like to believe that the people who use those features would make the much simpler switch to Linux but with the new WSL and (ridiculous) terminal I know a lot of them will be persuaded to transition into the special hell that is Windows.