Re: Nice Automator article on O'Reilly
Re: Nice Automator article on O'Reilly
- Subject: Re: Nice Automator article on O'Reilly
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 18:06:29 +0100
Elliotte Harold wrote:
>AppleScript's syntax, while more clumsy and less efficient from a pure
>programming point of view is also much FRIENDLIER.
>
>I couldn't disagree more. AppleScript is by far the least friendly language it's ever been my displeasure to use; and I've used Perl, VBA, and C++.
I think you both miss the point. AppleScript's syntax LOOKS much friendlier. It's a brilliant marketing hook that's guaranteed to snare the sort of GUI-lovin' newbies who'd never go near at a "real" programming language in a million years. A way to get that first foot in the door. You betcha secretaries are jumping to try it: it makes programming look EASY.
Of course, nobody ever reads the small-print at this point in the deal, so they don't realise that "Looks Easy" is not actually the same thing as "Is Easy"; nor do they realise that AppleScript's particular implementation of these good looks actually hides some real bone-ugliness underneath. That'll bite them later, of course, but as they don't know any better by then they'll naturally assume the gnawing's just normal. And as long as they don't try to do anything too clever or complex, push the language too hard or go in directions that are not its natural strengths, then there's actually a reasonable chance they'll get by. Of course, "getting by" is not actually the same thing as "positively thriving", but they don't realise that either, so by and large they're content with their lot. (This was my own story for several years, btw, till a disastrous 30 hour-straight debugging session on one of my mighty spaghetti AppleScripts gave my own perspective a drastic rearranging. Of course, it's been downhill from there ever since...;)
>I mean, really, what insane person ever thought it made sense to allow classes and methods to be defined with white space in their names but then not allow the parser to recognize those classes and methods?
White space in identifiers is a brilliant idea. White space in identifiers in dumb plaintext source code where there's no sensible way to derive the essential 'this is an identifer' semantics is a dicey-as-hell implementation. To do it right you have to get rid of source code altogether and go with some sort of structure editor, where the same semantics can be derived by other means.
Done really well, an end-user programming environment would not only be more readable than AppleScript (especially for folk who don't know the language), since it could easily provide all sorts of meta-information and interactive help just by rolling the cursor over the code, for example, it'd also be far easier to write (since the editor could constantly keep the user right about what's syntactically and - to some extent - semantically correct input). Just as the Mac GUI helps guide users and keep them on the right track in a way the DOS command line never could. In fact, if I didn't waste so much time on this list yabbering on about how wonderfully great this would be, I could probably have written the damn thing myself by now. ;p
Cheers,
has
--
http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/
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