HyperTalk and AppleTalk are both easy to read, but a little hard to write--AppleScript moreso than HyperTalk. I think it's a reasonable tradeoff to make. It may

HyperTalk and AppleTalk are both easy to read, but a little hard to write--AppleScript moreso than HyperTalk. I think it's a reasonable tradeoff to make. It may be too much of a pain form some, but I did some substantial work in HyperTalk and AppleScript (and its immediate ancestor, SK8Script), and found that I got used to it. I wouldn't say that I ever loved it, but I didn't mind it so much after I got used to it. At the risk of veering into inside baseball (I worked on SK8Script, HyperCard, and AppleScript over the course of a few years), a problem with AppleScript was that it was really only the outline of a language with a pluggable grammar and pluggable semantics. One of my colleagues working on it characterized it as more like a network protocol than a programming language. It specified some fairly broad abstractions (containers, elements, documents, and so on), but left most of the details and the vocabulary up to applications, so the same nouns and verbs could mean wildly different things in different contexts. That made it even harder to write. On the other hand, it was usually really easy to read and understand, which is handy. By the way, I'm finding htmx and hyperscript quite useful.