Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
- Subject: Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
- From: Chris Page <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:32:07 -0800
On Dec 17, 2008, at 12:39 PM, has wrote:
Agreed. There's no point being precious about such things, because
neither AppleScript nor AppleScript users care if code is
aesthetically pleasing or academically correct as long as it runs
and does [more or less] what they want.
AppleScript users care if their scripts break. Sometimes they break
because they were written with lots of incidental dependencies on
things that change (e.g., running the same script on a different
computer may not work). I've suggested a relatively simple way to
eliminate some important incidental dependencies.
This is why I think adding namespaces for osaxen isn't justified,
even though they're the right thing to do in terms of good language
design. [1] The great mass of AppleScripters couldn't care less for
their academic merits, and while the lack of namespaces does
occasionally cause practical problems that do affect users, ...
In my opinion, AppleScript's greatest strength is its approachability
and low barrier to entry, and its greatest weakness is in scalability.
I am a professional software developer, versed in several programming
languages. Myself and many like me use AppleScript all the time,
because it's the best solution for some jobs, but we need it to scale
better.
There is a large gap between AppleScript and, say, C or Objective-C.
AppleScript should take you farther along before you have to switch to
another language just to accomplish something slightly more complex or
low-level.
I think good languages (and libraries) make it easy to write simple
programs and provide a smooth path to larger, more complex programs,
whether it's a so-called "scripting" language or not. And I think
that's good for all users of that language.
... changing the current behaviour would affect them a whole lot more.
Not necessarily. You're assuming a particular design.
The current behaviour may be technically flawed, but it's what users
and their scripts have learned to expect.
I'd rather not teach people to expect flaws, and I'd rather deliver
experienced users the relief of the removal of flaws.
--
Chris Page
The other, other AppleScript Chris
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