Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

The question

One of the "news" items today is that some Java developers are switching away from Mac OS X because Mac OS X 10.5 didn't have the latest Java 1.6, either by default in the system or as a download.

The question I would like to ask those developers is: why didn't they switched when Mac OS X 10.4 came out? It also didn't have the latest (at the time) Java 1.5 available and it took some time to appear, and when it did, it was a port by Apple of the 1.5 update 2.

Historically, Java always lagged behind on the Mac platform because it was always ported by Apple. Engineering resources need to be placed where they will do the most good, and for Apple clearly Java was not as high priority as other things.

I think all people would love to see their favorite language supported right of the start. I for one would love to see the dynamic bridge between Cocoa and Perl supported by Apple in the same official way as Python and Ruby have, but Perl doesn't have a marketing message as strong as those two.

My advise would be to relax, take a breath, and wait.

I suppose you could always try and compile from the source, right?