The problem isn't the AppleScript's wordiness, it's that knowing the exact way to phrase a command correctly is horrible (and it doesn't help AppleScript is imp

The problem isn't the AppleScript's wordiness, it's that knowing the exact way to phrase a command correctly is horrible (and it doesn't help AppleScript is implicitly strongly typed). In HyperTalk you could write something like put 4 + 4, get it; or set fred to 4 + 4; or put 4 + 4 into fred. You could leave quotes off a string, or put quotes on a number, and it would usually "just work". This made HyperTalk easy for non-programmers to write, yet still easy for programmers to write well (and debug). AppleScript allows even more syntactic constructs than HyperTalk, but they all turn out to be semantically different in incompatible ways. (It's very much like they map directly onto C++'s . -> * and & directly.) So if you can set fred to 4 + 4, you probably can't put 4 + 4 into fred. (I'm pulling these examples out of my ass without looking up actual syntax because I can't be bothered.) I went from being a competent HyperTalk programmer to "godlike" thanks to a book by Danny Goodman (The HyperTalk Bible, I think). When AppleScript came out, Apple commissioned Goodman to write the definitive book on AppleScript -- I read it and still couldn't get anywhere. AppleScript is kind of like Blender. I can eventually figure out how to do anything, but knowledge of how I did it evaporates almost instantly. It's perhaps the worst programming language I have ever actually tried to master. Danny Goodman later wrote books on JavaScript and DHTML which, for their time, were just as great as his HyperTalk stuff, but no-one has ever been able to make AppleScript not suck (for me, anyway).