Re: AppleScript-Users Digest, Vol 4, Issue 357
Re: AppleScript-Users Digest, Vol 4, Issue 357
- Subject: Re: AppleScript-Users Digest, Vol 4, Issue 357
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:35:50 -0400
On 7/30/07,
Kevin Bradley <
email@hidden> wrote:
On Jul 29, 2007, at 11:34 PM, Ed Stockly wrote:
Rather than answer your question I'm going to tell you to learn
Python or Perl or Automator or whatever other technology. I'm not
saying there is no place for that at all on this list, but if someone
is struggling with the language, at least help them get past whatever
roadblock their facing is more important than promoting your pet
technology.
Now, at last, I feel you've gotten to the heart of the whole issue. While sometimes the "best" solution (defined as "fastest,", "most convenient", etc. as defined by the one writing) may be "do shell script," all too often the list is used as a means of proselytizing someone's favorite language (or selling someone's book).
I'm going to call BS on that, again. It's just not so. Some of us reply with suggestions that the OP use a "do shell script" solution, but I sure haven't seen that many replies that say "use a different language". As has been said before, there's a big difference between saying 'Using { do shell script "ls" } solves your filename-finding problem' and saying 'Here's a nickel, kid, go get yourself a real programming language.' Some of the replies in this thread may have tended toward that latter statement, but that's wholly orthogonal to the original complaint.
Every once in a while I've seen a thread detour into how best to code the fiddly bits between the quotes of the do shell script command, which may involve a debate on the relative merits of awk/bash/clisp/cut/grep/guile/perl/python/ruby/sed/tcl... I'd say that such discussions are probably off-topic, but it hasn't happened that often in the
2.5 years I've been here.
I haven't seen much book-pimping, either. I do recall Mr. Neuburg pushing the new edition of his book pretty hard when it first came out, but it's a great resource with an update that the folks on this list needed to know about. And I don't recall any instances of him, say, answering a question with "Rather than tell you the answer, I'm going to say you should buy my book and look on page X."
--
Mark J. Reed <
email@hidden>
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