Re: Swift & AppleScript
Re: Swift & AppleScript
- Subject: Re: Swift & AppleScript
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 20:57:40 +0100
On 3 Jun 2014, at 10:11 am, John Day wrote:
> How does Swift fit into the picture with ASObj-C ?
As Shane says, it doesn't, at least not on a technical level. Both are
Cocoa clients, so sit independently side-by-side of one another. Long
term, who knows? Swift supports a REPL ("Read Evaluate Print Loop"; an
interactive interpreter, basically), not just compiled use, so perhaps
someday Apple will decide to position it as *the* officially blessed Mac
OS X scripting language, and downgrade AppleScript to official legacy
status. AS is effectively legacyware anyway, into the long tail of its
practical working life. While it has its virtues (which others could and
should learn from), there is just too much about it that is
fundamentally flawed, broken, and unfixable.
Taking the long term view, the best thing for Mac scripters would be if
Apple created a new end-user language that learns from both AS's good
bits and its bad, while also incorporating all the advances been made in
end-user programming over the last 20 years. Look at not just the Swift
language itself but also the new Xcode editing features now being built
around it against the increasingly creaky and obnoxious Objective-C;
that's basically the same gap as exists between AppleScript and what
modern end-user scripting and automation should now be. However, without
heavyweight support for end-user programming and automation both inside
and outside Apple, I can't see that happening, in which case AppleScript
will continue to totter on to the end.
I've some more information and thoughts relating to this topic, but I'll
put those in a separate mail...
has
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