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: Jon Pugh <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:59:53 -0800
At 1:41 AM -0800 12/18/08, Chris Page wrote:
>Obviously, tastes vary, but although at first I thought AppleScript was pretty loose and wild, after I learned the actual language it turned out to be more rigid than I first thought. It may sometimes have more syntactic variations than I think were necessary, but they're typically just synonyms to allow you to make the English less awkward in some instances, not different semantics, and they're optional. Heck, it's simpler than Perl and saner than some parts of C syntax.
I'm with Chris on this one. AppleScript is not loose at all. It's an incredibly simple language.
The part people generally have trouble with is simply the events which applications support and the construction of application object specifiers.
>One sort of "scaling" is that you should be able to write libraries in AppleScript without resorting to writing a scripting addition or a scriptable application. You tend to be stuck putting all the code you need into a single, monolithic file and using copy/paste to "share" code.
Script Debugger provides this feature in a very useable form and has for over 10 years. I use it extensively with my SmartString object to do string manipulation, and I contend that I can do string manipulation, one of AppleScript's purported weaknesses, better than in other languages. Understandable and simple code, with no weird regex patterns.
I can write lots of general functionality in AppleScript and do so regularly.
Jon
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