RE: [rant] "Never mind the quality, feel the width!"
RE: [rant] "Never mind the quality, feel the width!"
- Subject: RE: [rant] "Never mind the quality, feel the width!"
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 21:54:52 +0000
Jacopille, David wrote:
> I work for a mutual fund company with $300B in assets. We have 30K
lines of Applescript in active use.
>
> Who knows if that's unusual, or common? Certainly not Apple. Apple
is not interested in AppleScript users.
Well, 30K'd be a more meaningful measure put into context - there's a
big difference between 30K of tight, mission critical code that can't be
done any other way versus 30K of rambling odds-and-sods that could be
replaced by 3K C# tomorrow.
FWIW, at my last job I developed a 25K server-based distributed
master-slave application: job server, workflow engine, and artwork
templating system that controlled Adobe apps via Apple events. Pretty
high-end stuff (I had some appreciative comments from Kallik users:),
all built and maintained by a single not-especially-bright (and
certainly not highly trained) scripter. I couldn't achieved that at
anything like the same time and cost if I'd had to do it all via Adobe's
embedded lower-level C++ APIs. My current venture's a bit more modest in
some ways, being an Illustrator-based templating system that users run
directly on their own desktops, but if it works out it could be quite
the thing as it puts artwork automation directly into the hands of
artworkers themselves, rather than the highly paid managers and
consultants tiers away from the folk that do the actual work.
Again, not the sort of thing that puts much of a blip on Apple's books
(if anything, artwork automation would likely decrease the number of
iMac sales by putting the least efficient manual artworkers out of a
job:p), but still, I think it proves a general principle: create the
opportunities, and others will come and build platform for you. Look at
iPad, for example: the greatest Stone Soup ever made. My interest is in
closing that gap between creator and consumer in all areas, including
"programming": it's contrived, unjustified, and mendaciously disempowering.
> But I disagree that they need to be.
I agree. What's really important isn't the AppleScript language, it's
the philosophy behind it: that users should have the ability to extend
and customize and tailor their machines to be what they want or need
them to be. Which may anything from a million-dollar automation workflow
at a Fortune 500, or a more efficient way to follow their Likes status
on Facebook or Twitter.
I'd be perfectly happy to see AppleScript pushed to the legacy heap
tomorrow, as long as it was succeeded by something that delivers more
effectively on this goal. My real worry is that the longer Mac
automation is allowed to fester and decay, the less motivation (or for
that matter audience) there will be to justify any sort of successor at
all.
Which is not to say I have a problem with "devices" - it's the right way
to move overall - but there's a big difference between "optimized to do
one thing really, really well", and "locked-down inherently incapable of
doing anything else at all". The tyranny of the fanatical salesman who
cannot allow users to skip their meticulously placed revenue generation
pinch points is no different to the intolerance of the Real Programmer
who declares ordinary users utterly unfit to "program" *his* (not their)
precious hardware and software. (Me, of course, I just want the best
possible means to put the boot to both.;)
has
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