On 20 Dec 2015, at 11:24 PM, Jean-Christophe Helary <
email@hidden> wrote:
If veteran AS coders were to write a rock solid standard library for Applescript, open sourced etc. I am pretty sure that word of mouth would spread the news like wild fire and that *everybody* would use it *and* promote it.
Sadly, history suggests you're completely wrong. I mean, I'd be happy to open-source BridgePlus if I thought it would make any difference, and although it's no StandardLib, it contains lots of useful stuff -- much of it the result of direct requests and feedback. But a lot of people won't even consider using it because it's not stamped Made by Apple. It goes beyond a preference: for many people the issue is simply not negotiable.
It's ironic. So much AppleScript-related stuff that does come from Apple -- Exhibit A, Finder scripting -- is hopeless and decaying, to put it politely. But it has that magic Apple stamp. So users will stumble around trying to get sense from things like entire contents or try to bend shell commands that don't know about packages -- anything to avoid using something simple like filesIn:recursive:asPaths: from a third party because it's not anointed. We now have libraries, and the Resources folder of applets and bundles is directly exposed in Script Editor, making deployment logistics painless -- but still the aversion persists.
I suspect this is one of the things that separates scripters from regular programmers. Imagine if all the developers of the non-Apple Store apps we all use every day said, no, the Sparkle framework for checking for updates looks nice, but we don't want to use anything third-party, so there'll be no auto-checking for updates in our apps until Apple provides it for us. Imagine what we'd call them.
I'm starting to sound like Hamish...