Applescript was only a front end for OSA, for instance there is/was a working perl front end for OSA. The reason it never really took off is mostly due to OSA i

Applescript was only a front end for OSA, for instance there is/was a working perl front end for OSA. The reason it never really took off is mostly due to OSA itself, and not the scripting language I think. For instance most of the Adobe product don't care about OSA and offer a Lua extension mechanism instead (even there, I feel they only cared avout filters and publishing modules). Or even iPhoto had severe limitations on what could be done through the scripting interface. The Finder has perhaps the most useful interface, but anything done there can also be done in the shell IMO. There must be other apps exposing very useful functionalities to OSA, but I haven't see many.