I'm not a remarkable programmer by Hacker News standards, but I have experience in what I think is a decent variety of languages. I've done C and assembly; I'v

I'm not a remarkable programmer by Hacker News standards, but I have experience in what I think is a decent variety of languages. I've done C and assembly; I've done a stack-based language; I've done the popular dynamic imperative languages (Perl, Python, JavaScript, a little Ruby); I've done Lisp and Haskell. Heck, I've even programmed in Visual Basic. And in all my programming adventures, AppleScript has to be the weirdest, most backward, hardest to figure out language I've ever had the misfortune of using. I think Gruber nails it here -- English and other natural languages are not nearly precise enough to express program text, and the problem is exacerbated when you try to support multiple natural languages simultaneously. Visual Basic may not be a terrific programming language, but at least it's internally consistent. To quote Einstein, "Everything must be made as simple as possible, and not simpler." AppleScript's designers tried to simplify away the essence of programming, and wound up making scripting much, much harder than it should be. To anyone out there who needs to script OS X, save yourself a great deal of pain and avoid the temptation of using AppleScript just because it's OS X's "native" scripting language (this is was my mistake). Access OSA through a sane language like Ruby or Python instead.