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> AppleScript never was a programming language for developers But, who is it for then? For general users they still made it too difficult to discover how to do
by josho 10y ago
> AppleScript never was a programming language for developers
But, who is it for then? For general users they still made it too difficult to discover how to do things. Perhaps, the failing was simply with the documentation and discovery of the language.
Regardless, it's clearly been an area underinvested for quite some time.
- tedmiston 10y agoGiven that it was introduced 20 years ago on System 7 and has survived through Mac OS 8/9/X, it's kind of hard to address the audience question over that timespan. But I think it was always intended to be accessible to end users. Personally, even as an experienced dev, I've found it hard to discover how to do things in AppleScript. The "natural" language can be surprisingly unintuitive sometimes, especially when it breaks down into a program that looks like half OOP / half NLP.
- supernintendo 10y agoAppleScript was originally intended as a way for non-programmers to develop applications, hence the "natural language" syntax. You could think of it as the spiritual successor to HyperTalk / HyperCard. Aside from that, the language served an important purpose in classic Mac OS which lacked preemptive multitasking and thus true IPC. AppleScript was used to allow multiple applications to communicate with one another using a pub-sub model.