Re: obligatory snipe [was Re: how can script bundles store extra stuff?]
Re: obligatory snipe [was Re: how can script bundles store extra stuff?]
- Subject: Re: obligatory snipe [was Re: how can script bundles store extra stuff?]
- From: pete boardman <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 09:16:49 +0100
On 24 Jul 2005, at 12:15, has wrote:
AppleScript's one big newbie advantage is that it's tremendously
easy to read: even folk who've no knowledge of programming can look
at AppleScript source and grok its general meaning. Battle-hardened
geeks, who can't understand why _anyone_ would want to use
AppleScript, totally underestimate how crucial an advantage this is
for a certain class of user. For actually writing code, however,
AppleScript is way below par: other languages, despite their less
charming looks, actually work out much better in terms of clarity,
coherence and unambiguousness.
True. But the main reason we newbies like using AppleScript is as
much to do with the workflow as the language itself. Find some
existing code on the net or in an email, launch Script Editor, paste
it in, hit Run - it compiles, formats, and runs it, with feedback as
to how each line worked. If it works, save it somewhere, and that's
it. No need to worry about formatting and indenting, saving as a file
first with the right suffix, including or importing libraries,
setting paths and environments, declaring variables at different
levels of some invisible hierarchy - all the programmer-type things
which programmers seem to like (and value) but scripters don't. [1]
I like this workflow. I know that life is not always this simple, and
that there's a price to be paid. I'd be happy to write scripts in
anything else (although I like AppleScript's punctuation-light
approach), but everything else I've seen is harder to use at this
basic level.
Pete
[1] I appreciate Chris Nebel's comments about the fact that there's
no real difference between programmers and scripters. OK. But in that
case I think you need to make a distinction between people who find
programming-type things easy and those who find them difficult.
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