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Re: jumpstart me with the scripting bridge

Christopher Nebel wrote:

Defective by design, in other words.


By design, yes; "defective" is a matter of perspective. On the one hand, it doesn't work correctly with all existing applications. 

Quite.


On the other hand, do you really want to have to know the particular style of "make new" that each application supports? I don't think so.

Uh, as AppleScripters we *already have to know* all this crap. No, we're not entirely happy about it, but it's something we just have to deal with in order to get things done. We realise this, and until AppleScript's fairy godmother someday magics all these problems away it's something I think we can manage to live with [1].

This top-down diktat of breaking Scripting Bridge for any application that doesn't meet newly imposed and often unwritten standards is punishing application developers who for the last decade have, entirely reasonably, followed AppleScript as their benchmark reference in developing and testing their scripting support, and aggravating users who just want to get their work done without it being sabotaged by ideologically driven tools.


I appreciate that you folks are wanting to make things better for everyone, but trying to take shortcuts such as this is the sort of cheap, lazy move that tends to come back and bite you later on. Or, more specifically, it bites your developers and users, who then come back to chomp on you in turn.

You really want to do it properly, you have to start at the bottom and build your way up from there; starting with the development of a simplified, unambiguous and foolproof Apple Event Object Model specification, all publically documented in exhaustive detail, precisely implemented by server-side frameworks (e.g. Cocoa Scripting), and fully verifiable by developers using Apple-supplied testing tools.

Get the foundations exactly right, and everything else will eventually follow. Slap a thick layer of plaster over the existing cracks, and ultimately all you're doing is compounding the problem.


has

[1] Though much better application documentation *would really help* tide us over while we're waiting for the AppleScript fairy to arrive (hint-hint, application developers).
--
http://appscript.sourceforge.net
http://rb-appscript.rubyforge.org

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