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Re: obligatory snipe [was Re: how can script bundles store extra stuff?]
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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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