MacPerl Gains Ground
Rich Morin (rdm@cfcl.com) of Prime Time Freeware has produced the MacPerl CD-ROM, a distribution of the Perl for the Macintosh along with other Mac tools and documentation. I asked him about the MacPerl community and we were soon joined in email by Matthias Ulrich Neeracher (neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch), who is the person primarily responsible for porting Perl to the Macintosh.
| MacPerl Resources
Prime Time Freeware
Matthias Neeracher
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Matthias: In fact, it's approximately 1000 and remains fairly stable. However, there seems to be a self-limiting effect at work here in that with more then 8-900 users, the list grows too noisy for some and they unsubscribe.
Counting through mail logs, I found that at least 3500 different e-mail addresses were subscribed to the list at one point, so it's plausible that 2500 to 3000 different people were subscribed to the list over the last 5 years.
It's very hard to estimate the number of users, since it's impossible to estimate the percentage of them on the list. MacPerl has been distributed on several Mac Magazine CDs, especially in Japanese magazines, so it might have penetration well beyond the internet. My estimate is similar to Rich's, in the 5-10,000 user range.
Also, because the Mac does not have a native command-based "shell" (discounting MPW, which is not a mass-market product), Mac users may not have experience in using textual commands of any sort.
On the other hand, a great deal of Web development is done on the Mac platform, so MacPerl would seem to be a good fit. Also, many UNIX users keep Macs around for "productivity tools". Some of these folks are likely to be interested in having a version of Perl for the Mac.
Matthias: To use one example that struck me as particularly odd, some people are apparently using MacPerl as a frontend to DNA sequence databases.
Rich: MacPerl also serves as an administrative scripting language for the Mac. Some tasks do not fit well in the interactive Macintosh paradigm (e.g., copy all the files with the extension '.html' to another directory); MacPerl makes it trivial to automate these tasks. In fact, MacPerl allows the creation of "droplets" (Perl scripts, packaged as applications, onto which the user can drag- and-drop files and folders.
Vicki Brown and I are working, sporadically, on a package called 'Mop' (Mother of perl), which adds Unix-like commands to a Perl- based shell. If we can get it to the point where we're reasonably happy with it, we'll talk about it on the MacPerl Pages and in the MacPerl book.
Matthias: On this issue, there is my theoretical position and OTOH the practical implementation.
The theoretical position is that eventually, I'd like to have every file that occurs in both the Mac and standard Perl releases to be identical in both. I will *not* merge Mac specific files into the standard distribution (but will not stop anybody from doing so either), because that would enlarge the standard distribution a lot. The numbers that I came up with:
| Source File Size | Lines of Code | |
| Mac specific core files | ~20K | ~1000 |
| ext/MacPerl and ext/Mac | 1M | >40000 |
| MacPerl IDE (Application) | ~600K | ~23000* |
(And with those, you'd still not have all sources you need to build MacPerl. There are a few non-Perl specific libraries needed in addition).
Regarding the practical implementation of my theoretical position, I'm putting this off for "after I finish my PhD thesis" which, itself, has been a target far more moving than I'd like to admit.
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