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: David Rouse <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:12:22 -0500
Paul Scott wrote:
4) Applescript can't run by itself the way a shell script can. It has
to connect to a window server, so it can't run well out of crontab or
launchd without the user being "logged in".
5) It's not suited for generalized scripting. Any use beyond
controlling an active GUI application is severely limited.
Just from my point of view, that is exactly what AppleScript is all
about. At the newspaper I work for we use AppleScript quite frequently
to automate repetitive tasks in Quark's QuarkXPress (a GUI page layout
application), tasks that standard Perl, Bash, etc. wouldn't be helpful with.
I know, layout the paper in LaTeX or troff or something, thanks ... and
in today's economy perhaps we should look that over. :-)
So, when we want to mangle a file we use Perl, command line stuff is
automated with shell scripting, when we want to provide a web service we
use PHP, and if we don't care about IO at all and just want idealized
code we use Haskell (joke!). But when we want to automate GUI
applications, so far AppleScript has been the way to go.
Again, just a point of view. Heck, I've gone and created a GUI app using
XCode and AppleScript, so I've been pushing the limits as well, and can
understand being fustrated.
But I'd like AppleScript to stay close to its GUI application scripting
roots and for Apple to have more scripting in their own applications (a
point I'm sure has been raised about a million times).
Cheers,
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