You bring back memories. There was a fellow associated with Dartmouth who called himself Archimedes Plutonium and would hijack many of the mail groups with what most classified as bizarre and off topic posts. IMHO, his posts never generated useful discussion (they were always off-topic) but instead caused a lot of spam in the newsgroups. It was about this time that the term "don't feed the trolls" became popular :)

Yes, OSX comes with Python and Perl. Both are somewhat limited. There have been issues with 64bit with Snow Leopard's Python and adding Perl modules to the default perl can break things. Dealing with multiple installations of each can have problems. I think modern Linux distributions handle this better.

I must be missing something. Why waste 10 min running purge and repair disk permissions to retrieve memory when a restart is much faster???

I abandoned MacPorts for Homebrew. One feature I like is that I can build any package I want (that doesn't have a formula) with './configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/name/version-no' and then do a 'brew link name' to make all the symbolic links or 'brew unlink name' to remove them. Helps solve annoying problems.

My main grump with MacOSX (still on Snow Leopard) compared to Linux is issues with 64 bit Python and MacOSX seems to store files all over the disk. Basically, if you want to work differently from the Steve Jobs Way, it takes a LOT of work. Couldn't agree more about the superior hardware quality.