Ruby 1.8 has been in OSX for a long time, I think apple is just go with a VERY conservative methodology of whatever the "stable/doesn't break existing scripts"

Ruby 1.8 has been in OSX for a long time, I think apple is just go with a VERY conservative methodology of whatever the "stable/doesn't break existing scripts" version is released at the time. Given 1.8 will be deprecated before the next release is out they won't have much choice but to use 1.9 then, or 2.0 maybe if its out. Compare to the new(er) perl 5 releases, ruby 1.9 does change some core things. Take for example the ping class being removed in 1.9. In perl 5.10->5.14.1 all of the new things like "say" and the new case statement are things you have to explicitly request in a script which sort of implies you know you need it. Existing scripts won't behave much different on 5.14 than they did on 5.8.x I upgraded my last Leopard box last night so can't find the builtin emacs version but its been around the 22.x series for some time. I don't think they track upstream nearly as insanely as most linux distros do. In either case I think rvm/perlbrew/pythonbrew and things like virtualenv/forgot the perl equivalent, sort of obviate the need for up to date interpreters in the base install. I think php was at 5.3 ish when I checked last night, forgot to look at the shell versions but zsh is new enough for my tastes.