Re: Informal poll
Re: Informal poll
- Subject: Re: Informal poll
- From: 2551phil <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 21:41:34 +0700
On 18 Jun 2014, at 21:06, has <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> But as it is today, it's a knotty, complicated, confusing, and ultimately painful-to-use language
I’ve been hearing this ever since I started learning/using AS (which in you folks’ terms was like this morning i.e., only about two years ago), but it’s never rang true for me.
Yes, of course, I’ve banged my head on the table (and the adjacent wall) many a time, but ne’er so hard nor so often as while getting to grips with Cocoa (my Cocoa scars are deeper and wider, by something of a stretch, that my AS ones.).
AS is simple to learn, if you have a decent guide (the main books on this are well-known enough that I won’t repeat them here) and access to plenty of resources (MacScripter, the ASUsers List, Mac OS X Technologies forum on ASC, StackExchange, etc), which pretty much we all do.
I don’t know why people insist otherwise. No, let me correct that. I think there’s two reasons why people insist on otherwise, and I don’t see either of them as the fault of the language itself:
1. Scriptable apps have to be learnt individually. Knowing your way round AS as a language is only half the battle. You have to know your way around each app you want to script (and it’s "object model”, whatever that actually means).
2. The AS Editor and Dictionary are less than helpful in guiding users on how to fix errors. At minimum, you want something like CodeSense in Xcode (a plan I had for my own AS editor app, though the jury’s out now as to how much further I’m going to progress with that project) as well as a some kind of debugger.
I think most people solve 1 through practice, and those willing to shell out the price, get round 2 with Script Debugger.
Like learning anything, if people aren’t willing to put in the effort, they’ll fail. But at least they’re handed a ready-made excuse for that failure by the persistent view that AS is somehow fundamentally flawed.
While I’m no computer scientist and won’t even attempt to engage on that level, I would say that I’ve found learning AS less effortful than a lot other things I’ve learned in my life. I had learned C, and some Objective-C, as well as having played around with a smattering of different scripting languages at beginner level (Python and Bash in particular) long before I started out with AppleScript, I’d say I feel more comfortable writing in AS than any other language I’ve learned either before or since (yeah, I’m looking at you, Swift and JavaScript…).
Best
Phil
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