Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
- Subject: Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2016 19:10:29 +0100
Shane Stanley wrote:
On 27 Jun 2016, at 11:21 AM, Stephen Cronin <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>I was wowed by the additions to 10.11, for example, +descriptorWithApplicationURL: (I haven’t looked at 10.12 yet..)
>I’m thinking that there is just no way that these additions were made to NSFoundation if AS is a ‘dying' technology….
The changes cover some obvious omissions, and I suspect their belated appearance reflects the simple fact that someone (in this case Hamish Sanderson) finally logged a formal bug report requesting them.
Indeed. I think Mr Cronin is much too easily wowed. A dozen methods
belatedly chucked into a major OS release almost a decade after they'd
have made any difference is hardly "significant progress"; never mind
any sign that AS is vigorously kicking. Although Shane is slightly
incorrect: I did not file a 'bug report requesting them', I filed a
feature request ticket with all of those ObjC methods already
implemented and documented attached to it as a file patch, so the only
thing left for Apple to do was copy-n-paste them into the right place. A
two-minute job at most; ploughing through the vast corporate bureaucracy
to do so would have taken infinitely longer. I'll admit I _was_ a little
surprised they actually did it - and within a mere year at that - though
not remotely surprised that even with all the work done for them they
still managed to cock it up (http://openradar.appspot.com/21477694). No
doubt we should be grateful for small "mercies".
There are plenty of signs AS is not dying.
O'rly? NAME THEM.
New books and tutorials? Except for Shane's ASOC books, the market for
which is purely existing, advanced AS users, not a sausage. (I even
asked Apress a couple years back about doing a 4th edition of Learn
AppleScript: not a hope in hell; could I write about Cocoa or iOS
instead?) New scriptable apps? Hardly a dribble. Improvements to
existing scriptable apps? Only notable case I can think of is iWork,
which was just putting back what was skipped over while iOSifying it, so
not actually an improvement, and Xcode8, which garnered precisely ONE
cheer, from an audience of TEN MILLION! Python/Ruby/ObjC/Swift users
getting on board? Cocoa Scripting still sucks every bit as much as it
did a decade ago. Scripting Bridge rests happily with Generalissimo
Franciso Franco. (And yes, I know they're turd-polishing it for 10.12.
Will still make no difference: it's Completely Failed.) JavaScript for
Automation? About the only good thing that Apple's achieved with that is
the above NSAppleEventDescriptor patch - which hardly counts for the
same reason[1] - other than that it's just another useless broken turd
shipped Dead On Arrival and promptly abandoned so they can go screw up
something more interesting instead. And JavaScript's more popular than
God now, so that's another million potential Mac automation fans, users,
and creators that they could've won over just dropped on the floor
without so much as a whimper.
Oh, and don't even _try_ counting the sandboxing-related changes as
signs of "progress", because they're not: they're just signs that the
cost of ditching AppleScript hasn't yet exceeded the cost of keeping it
ticking over. The only thing that surprises me is that the XPC Services
folks _haven't_ made a move (at least not publicly) towards peer-to-peer
IPC, because the in-app stuff has been working smoothly for several
years now so you'd think they'd be taking it to the logical next level
by now, which is to supercede Apple events as the standard high-level
IPC system for Mac *and* iOS. Frankly, I think they're either blind,
asleep, or (not unlikely) sunk into some interminable internal political
bog where various sections in the company put more effort into
protecting their own turf than working to the benefit of the business as
a whole (c.f. early 90s Apple and every Microsoft division ever).
No. If you know anything at all about the lifecycle of products, you
know that a new product's adoption rises fast, eventually hits its max,
and then slowly drops away again over a long period of time [2].
AppleScript and Mac automation have been in the long tail section of
that cycle for getting onto a decade now - it passed over the peak
probably around 2008, the time the last batch of AS books were signed
up, and was already showing signs by the time they were published a
couple years later. It's barely running above maintenance mode with a
development team that would be laughable in size if it wasn't already
largely useless.
But you know, ALL of that is secondary, because utimately there is ONLY
ONE measure that truly counts: *bums on seats*.
And it's blatantly obvious AppleScript hasn't seen an influx of new
users in at least 5 years now, so the only question left to ponder is
how long before the ones it currently has eventually slope off as well.
That doesn't mean a lot, although I think it's fair to say it would be surprising to see it killed without some kind of replacement, and there's no sign of that.
Hellooo, McFly? Even if you acknowledge that Scripting Bridge and
JavaScript for Automation are utterly unfit to replace AppleScript -
which Apple certainly never does - did you just miss this little
announcement: <http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/>? The fact that
Swift Playgrounds is itself also _utterly_ unfit for purpose is
irrelevant here; corporate's already staked its own reputations on
Swift's success so can't backtrack now, so the Swift evangelicals are
going to push it as far and as fast as they can regardless of right or
wrong. The Latterites are rolling, and there's no stopping 'em now. You
think they won't do to the AppleScript team precisely what the
AppleScript team did to the JavaScriptCore team right after the latter
announced ObjC-embeddable JSCore as a direct replacement to AS-based
automation? Heck, the only way the Swifties _won't_ think to take
AppleScript's toys for themselves is if they don't think they're even
worth taking, in which case we're straight back to AS continuing to slip
away slowly until such time as there's noone left to care when the plug
is finally pulled completely.
..
Hell, personally I'd burn AppleScript tomorrow if it meant saving Mac
automation, because as any old appscript user will tell you: you don't
actually need the AppleScript language to automate the holy tar out your
Mac, just an Apple event bridge that isn't total sack of turds. But with
as long as Messers Soghoian and Nebel are reliably on the job of fucking
up application scripting access for the other 10-20 million Mac geeks
who can't stand writing AppleScript code, then frankly AppleScript is
the _only_ bit keeping the rest of the shitshow alive. If I made a
mistake last year, it was offering my SwiftAE bridge to Sal; I should've
done what all the sane programmers do and route around that team
completely as the damage they are, and taken my chances going straight
to the Lattnerites. But eh, it's Apple's pram, not yours or mine, and
all its toys are entirely theirs to hog or toss over the side as they like.
Incidentally, if I'd managed to get my entoli language as far as a
usable prototype last year, I'd have been happy to kick it Swiftie-wards
and see if they wanted to run with it themselves. It would've been
infinitely more appropriate to Playgrounds than Swift, being a shameless
rip of of Logo (unlike the Lattnerites, I've actually done a bit of
homework on end-user programming and learnable learning tools, and
anyone who hasn't at very minimum both read AND understood Papert's
Mindstorms can go kiss my hairy Scotch ass till they have). And its
major AppleScript influences (NOT an accident) plus the fact I'm about
the one person on Earth who knows how to build Apple event bridges
virtually as good as AppleScript's, would've positioned it as an ideal
successor to AppleScript too. But eh, that one's stuck in crappy Swift
typesystem hell, and I don't have any time to get back to it soon now as
I need to extract a bucket of money out of the packaging industry in the
next couple years so I can afford all the canned goods and shotguns I'm
gonna need for when Brexit inevitably plays out as a real-life
interactive version of 28 Days Later.
Still, tell me you couldn't live with this if you had to, especially
when you get modern 21st century editing tools and a million shiny new
users:
tell application "Finder" do
move {document file 1 of folder "Documents" of home, to: desktop}
done
Or even, if you're willing to live dangerously with custom parse-time
syntax extensions[3] like a certain other language we all know and love:
tell application "Finder" do
move document file 1 of folder "Documents" of home to desktop
done
(Oh, and unlike said language, you're free to use whitespace in all your
own names too(!) "English-like?" You ain't seen nuttin yet…)
Regards,
has
[1] Funny enough, the only reason I bothered to submit that patch was
because having just had six weeks of my time
(https://sourceforge.net/projects/appscript/files/JavaScriptOSA-2014-11-02.zip/download)
pissed down the drain by the good Mr Soghoian after I *explicitly* asked
him not to, I figured I might as well salvage *something* from all that
wasted work, even if only 1%. Of course, now I feel that I should've
submitted the patch after 10.6 kicked Carbon Apple events to the curb,
cos maybe if they'd added it then at least appscript might've managed an
AppleScript-length long tail itself. But eh, it's hard to care that much
once it's obvious the idiots are running the asylum.
[2]
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4gnnW5_1CAI/VCTl06Jq8ZI/AAAAAAAAAOs/sHt5ygroDhw/s1600/productlifecycle.png
[3] Pratt parsing FTW! Any algorithm nerds, check it out if you've not
already done so. It's as simple as it is beautiful, and if I was a
bitshift operator I'd marry it in a flash.
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
AppleScript-Users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
Archives: http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-users
This email sent to email@hidden