Re: AppleScript a miserable and utter failure
Re: AppleScript a miserable and utter failure
- Subject: Re: AppleScript a miserable and utter failure
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 20:15:32 -0400
- Thread-topic: AppleScript a miserable and utter failure
on 2005-09-28 6:47 PM, has at email@hidden wrote:
> Allowing osaxen to pollute the global namespace was a really, really dumb
> decision; AS probably would've gotten away with all its clever trickery if it
> hadn't been for that.) Application/extension authors should be free to use
> whatever identifiers they want, not made to fight bloody combat to the death
> over who gets the last non-crappy identifier on some massive, lumbering
> "Officially Approved" list. I can't think of any other environment that would
> impose such bloated, ridiculous bureaucracy on contributors and get away with
> it,
Objective-C/Cocoa. Many classes and other global-scope identifiers in Cocoa
require a couple of arbitrary characters in a prefix to "guaranty" (rather,
improve the odds of) avoiding namespace collisions. We can live with it, and
it's a great language for getting things done.
If osax writers would follow the advice that's been floating around for the
last 5 or 6 years to stop writing osaxen and write scriptable background
applications instead, these problems would be confined to the few essential
osaxen that really have become part of the language.
Personally, I've never gotten excited about this issue in the AppleScript
context. In the scripter/programmer debate, I've always taken the programmer
side -- of course it's programming. But so what? AppleScript really is
easier, in the early stages of learning, than most of the dozen or so
programming languages I've used. And once you're into it deep enough to run
into these issues on a regular basis, you know how to deal with them.
I still, after 12 years, think the English-like aspirations of AppleScript
serve a good and useful purpose. I never tire of telling the story of a
certain AppleScript book for which I was a tech editor. The author's draft
undertook to describe in simple English what the script he was about to
write was going to do, so that you, dear reader, could understand its logic
before you got down to writing the actual script. I looked at his
plain-English pseudocode preview and thought to myself, I think that will
execute. And it did. He thought he was writing plain English in order to
make his meaning clear, but he was actually writing AppleScript!
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
PreFab Software - http://www.prefab.com/scripting.html
The AppleScript Sourcebook - http://www.AppleScriptSourcebook.com
Vermont Recipes - http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes
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