[Pythonmac-SIG] Publicity opportunities
has
hengist.podd at virgin.net
Thu Aug 19 17:59:04 CEST 2004
steve harley wrote:
>i just want to reinforce has's well-framed comments.. as someone from
>the trenches of AppleScript & Frontier, and with a decent OO
>background, a few stabs at Python have quickly convinced me that Python
>+ [something like appscript] can be far more productive than
>AppleScript,
For benefit of folks unfamiliar with AS: Python's advantages are its
plentiful libraries and community expertise. AppleScript has pathetic
library support (meaning you have to write most everything from
scratch) and a user community that, while enthusiastic, isn't
terribly knowledgeable (lots of cargo-cultism; often the blind are
leading the blind). The AppleScript language itself is ahead of
Python in some ways (very clean and simple OO model, persistent
objects), behind in others (weaker built-in types, slow, buggy), and
deeply flawed in others (overly complex language model, ambiguous
syntax, ghastly unstable keyword soup). For trivial IAC stuff, AS can
actually be quite nice (if you know what you're doing). But mostly
its just underpowered, undersupported, confusing and frustrating.
>and could quickly become the choice of savvy Mac
>application scripters if AppleScript weren't so entrenched.
Yeah, find it some champions in the pre-press automation field and
it'll soon take off.
>i would love to see Apple support has in his efforts with appscript
I couldn't care less about Apple supporting appscript or not. I think
it's fine that OSS developers should provide the language-side
support themselves; if they can't be bothered to do it then why
should Apple?
All I want Apple to do is provide decent APIs and a level playing
field. The Cocoa frameworks' OSA support is currently pretty poor:
only the AppleScript language component is supported, which isn't
much use to users who want to attach or record Python/Perl/etc.
scripts in your average Cocoa application. (Sure there's nothing to
stop a third-party developing their own Cocoa wrappers for OSA, but
it'd be a lot more popular coming from Apple.) They could also stop
conflating application scripting with the AppleScript language. While
it's a handy marketing label for them, it really skews user
perceptions of these two independent technologies and makes it that
much harder for other languages to establish mindshare, and I think
the AppleScript association probably does as much harm as good for
Mac IAC given its lousy rep as a language amongst professional
developers.
Cheers,
has
http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/
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