Re: What's the biggest barrier to wider AS adoption?
Re: What's the biggest barrier to wider AS adoption?
- Subject: Re: What's the biggest barrier to wider AS adoption?
- From: email@hidden (Michael Sullivan)
- Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 16:56:35 -0400
- Organization: Business Card Express of Connecticut
>
What I'm wondering is, AppleScript is really cool, and it seems like
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it's not nearly as widely used as it could be. Why do you think that
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is?
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Not trying to start a brouhaha, just curious about what the sages
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think. Feel free to respond off-list.
My own belief? It's a PITA. Bugginess in the scripting implementation
of many apps, including a lot of Apple system components. Lack of good
documentation. Applescript is no way, no how, what it tried to be,
which was completely intuitive. IMO, if you don't have the fundamental
abilities of a decent programmer, it is not realistic to write useful
Applescripts, even though it is much easier to do and learn than scratch
development in a standard language.
That said, it's really powerful, to the extent that one is willing to
beat one's head against a wall for a while, and can do many things
fairly easily (once you've paid your head-beating dues) that would be
completely infeasible with traditional programming.
If Apple really wanted AS to be widely used (and it would be the best
possible thing for adoption of the mac, IMO), they would work like crazy
to smooth out implementation details of all their own components, and
make everything possible in the OS and their own software scriptable --
They would also offer assistance to developers writing scriptable apps,
perhaps offering frameworks for OSA scriptability.
Unfortunately for Apple, only some of the problem is them. The real
power of Applescript is not in scripting the system, but in scripting
applications. To the extent that many apps are highly scriptable, there
are people exploiting that and building solutions cheaply and
effectively that can't be duplicated off the mac platform. But much of
the problem with adoption can be traced to how difficult it is to figure
out the scripting of particular apps.
Michael
--
Michael Sullivan email@hidden
Business Card Express of Connecticut Thermographers to the Trade
"You hate your job -- why didn't you say so? There's a support group
for that. It's called everybody; they meet at the bar." -Drew Carey