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What makes AppleScript difficult
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What makes AppleScript difficult

  • Subject: What makes AppleScript difficult
  • From: Richard Doust <email@hidden>
  • Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2007 01:26:50 -0500
Chris Page asked that anyone who might want to say what they think makes AppleScript difficult do so in a separate thread. He asked that the answer be specific to the language. Problem is, in order for a language to be usable, there have to be libraries. With AppleScript, it's all about the applications that offer up their functionality via the scripting interface.
I'm reading O'Reilly's AppleScript, The Definitive Guide (2004), pages 325 and 326, and all over the place it says, "How do you think you would do this? Well, you would be wrong. Here's how you do it, and the problem is, the Dictionaries don't tell you to do it that way, so how are you supposed to find out?"
There's very little feedback when things don't work. Anyone who produces a scriptable application should take responsibility for documenting the scriptability, and a Dictionary alone is not enough. Makes the language hard to use. A language is never just the language, it's the language and the libraries, or, in this case, the applications that make their functionality available through AppleScript.
Just my $.02.
Rich
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