[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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