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I’m wondering if Swift Playgrounds (both the app and the Xcode pane) and the purchase of Workflow could be leading to an updated automation strategy. If they w

I’m wondering if Swift Playgrounds (both the app and the Xcode pane) and the purchase of Workflow could be leading to an updated automation strategy. If they want students to learn Swift on an iPad, they must think it isn’t too complex for other stuff. AppleScript has always been powerful at the great expense of being a pain to implement. And it has a sort of Visual BASIC kind of dependency among longtime Apple customers (probably why it never dies entirely). When I abandoned AppleScript and switched to Python bindings, one of my reasons was that I wanted a more standard language with access to useful libraries. Swift could be that now...

hhas01 8y ago
Nah, Apple’s selling Swift to kids cos Tim Cook is a dingus who learned nothing of marketing while under Steve Jobs. Ol’ Steve would decide what consumer market he wanted to create, then beat all his engineers mercilessly to make the products that would fit that market. Tim just lifts whatever sack of crap they’ve got and tries to find suckers to buy it. Swift is rubberized C++; an Apple engineer’s vanity project made good; a second-rate development language for Cocoa development, and a pedagogical joke as far as kids are concerned. If Tim thinks SP is going to save Apple’s ed markets from being eaten by Chromebooks, he’s even less fit as a CEO than Stephen Elop. .. As to AppleScript, the pain for App developers was always in how to design and implement a robust, powerful, and user-friendly query-driven UI on top of their app, without Apple even telling them it was query-driven (not OO); never mind giving them a robust, powerful, and developer-friendly framework in which to build it. Still a non-trivial technical challenge, mind (just ask SQL/RDBMS engineers), but Apple could’ve still made it a lot less painful (i.e. better docs and support) and a lot more worthwhile (i.e. tons more users). Make it worth programmers time financially and/or personally, and they’ll crawl over broken glass to do it. But Apple mismanaged AppleScript almost from the start: pissing off its key designers so they walked out, taking all their knowledge with them, and then downhill from there. And as for all the popular languages that Sal _could_ have won over to Mac Automation, along with their millions of users for whom it should’ve been 100% pure Catnip for Geeks: * Python (appscript, 2005—hey! have we met?) * Ruby (rb-appscript, 2006) * Objective-C (objc-appscript, 2007) * JavaScript (“JavaScript OSA”, 2014; NodeAutomation, 2017) * Swift (SwiftAutomation, 2015) I wrote production-quality Apple event bridges for every one of the above, and tested, used, and supported most of them too. (We still use Python3+appscript ourselves—the stuff it can do is phenomenal.) And in the end I buried them all too, after Sal’s team, thinking they knew everything, stuck their own broken-ass garbage in Mac OS X and stunk those markets out. Part of which is my bad for being an utterly useless salesman; but mostly it’s on Sal for being such an arrogant ignorant and/or downright incompetent Product Manager for 20 years; and on Apple for not sacking his ass years sooner, before he ran Mac Automation into the ground for good. Good times.

hhas01 8y ago

Nah, Apple’s selling Swift to kids cos Tim Cook is a dingus who learned nothing of marketing while under Steve Jobs. Ol’ Steve would decide what consumer market he wanted to create, then beat all his engineers mercilessly to make the products that would fit that market. Tim just lifts whatever sack of crap they’ve got and tries to find suckers to buy it. Swift is rubberized C++; an Apple engineer’s vanity project made good; a second-rate development language for Cocoa development, and a pedagogical joke as far as kids are concerned. If Tim thinks SP is going to save Apple’s ed markets from being eaten by Chromebooks, he’s even less fit as a CEO than Stephen Elop. .. As to AppleScript, the pain for App developers was always in how to design and implement a robust, powerful, and user-friendly query-driven UI on top of their app, without Apple even telling them it was query-driven (not OO); never mind giving them a robust, powerful, and developer-friendly framework in which to build it. Still a non-trivial technical challenge, mind (just ask SQL/RDBMS engineers), but Apple could’ve still made it a lot less painful (i.e. better docs and support) and a lot more worthwhile (i.e. tons more users). Make it worth programmers time financially and/or personally, and they’ll crawl over broken glass to do it. But Apple mismanaged AppleScript almost from the start: pissing off its key designers so they walked out, taking all their knowledge with them, and then downhill from there. And as for all the popular languages that Sal _could_ have won over to Mac Automation, along with their millions of users for whom it should’ve been 100% pure Catnip for Geeks: * Python (appscript, 2005—hey! have we met?) * Ruby (rb-appscript, 2006) * Objective-C (objc-appscript, 2007) * JavaScript (“JavaScript OSA”, 2014; NodeAutomation, 2017) * Swift (SwiftAutomation, 2015) I wrote production-quality Apple event bridges for every one of the above, and tested, used, and supported most of them too. (We still use Python3+appscript ourselves—the stuff it can do is phenomenal.) And in the end I buried them all too, after Sal’s team, thinking they knew everything, stuck their own broken-ass garbage in Mac OS X and stunk those markets out. Part of which is my bad for being an utterly useless salesman; but mostly it’s on Sal for being such an arrogant ignorant and/or downright incompetent Product Manager for 20 years; and on Apple for not sacking his ass years sooner, before he ran Mac Automation into the ground for good. Good times.