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Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
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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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