Re: AS Library Question
Re: AS Library Question
- Subject: Re: AS Library Question
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 10:13:18 +0000
Shane Stanley wrote:
> In an idea world, I'd love to see such a library. But in an ideal
world, there are so many other things AS-related I'd like to see, too.
And I'm afraid the idea of a scarce programming resource with access the
source code of AppleScript spending his time writing something that many
of us with much lesser skills and access can do ourselves strikes me as
a sad waste -- I'd rather the time be spent on changes that expand our
abilities or fix more deeply-rooted problems.
Well, if you're going to talk about things on the AS devs can do, I'd
very much like to see AppleScript lists with O(1) lookup, like in every
other language that uses vector arrays. That has huge implications for
performance and usability. These sorts of longstanding defects are
blazingly obvious, and as Phil says filing tickets in the black hole of
Radar often feels like an exercise in futility. Users don't like
throwing away their own unpaid time, so why should folk at Apple be
surprised when they are no longer willing to do so?
The flipside is that fixing the array problem probably isn't a
five-minute job: making lookups O(1) should be pretty trivial, but the
problem code was added for a reason - probably a bad one that could be
far better addressed in other ways, but one that'll require some effort
just to figure out the impact of making the change, not to mention
identifying all the other code that'll need to be changed to compensate,
making those changes, and testing the crap out of them. And if you think
building standard libraries is risky boring work for programmers, it's
nothing by comparison to the risks and drudgery of making these kinds of
alterations to the runtime.
The thing is, I absolutely agree with Shane that building a standard
library is the sort of thing that community veterans could (and should!)
do themselves - and do a better job too since they'll collectively
iterate, test, and critique the things until they are totally satisfied
they're up to the job, and _only_ then propose it for addition to the
OS. And that's why I previously offered to do it for them, because I've
done it before so have plenty experience in this sort of work, and don't
mind doing scut-work if it helps lots of others out.
The real blocker is the Automation team are the final bastion of classic
Apple's Not Invented Here syndrome, which means us AS users could build
the greatest stdlib in the world and they still wouldn't include it; or,
even worse, would respond by writing their own crappy half-assed
alternative which does get bundled, totally undermining all of that
community investment and goodwill, and leaving _everyone_ stuck between
two lousy options: good but not standard, or standard but crap. It's a
massive waste of everyone's time, hugely counter-productive (worse than
doing nothing at all), and _very_ bad for future user-developer
relations, as already demonstrated. So there's no point IMO in the
community building a great stdlib unless the AS team first guarantee 1.
not to undercut it, and 2. to include it in OS X once it's proven itself.
It's not like _Apple itself_ has a fundamental problem with bundling
third-party work: they happily include Perl, Python, Ruby, and a bunch
of other third-party languages and their stdlibs, and regularly update
with new releases; it's just the AS team. So either they need to evolve
- rapidly - or else find Sal the Dinosaur's* tarpit and go lie down in
it for good, allowing a totally new team at Apple to take a completely
fresh crack at making Mac - and iOS - automation a technical _and_
popular success, before the whole concept is discredited and abandoned
for good.
Anyway, mull that one over, and if folks want to talk practicalities
I'll be happy to chat next year. Away to catch train now...
Cheers,
has
* See Sal's opening remark in his WWDC15 session video. Honestly, he
could've just pulled out Mac Automation and shot it right there on
stage. What a way to sell your product, and yourself...!
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