Gruber on AppleScript

I’ve always wanted to like AppleScript more. Even though I’ve occasionally been paid to write AppleScript code, and always have a few little snippets gluing parts of my work environment together, I’ve never really gained facility with it. I’ve always summarized its flaws this way: It’s very easy to read for general sense, but damn hard to write. Sort of the inverse of Perl – which, probably not coincidentally, is the world’s most popular glue language. So while this characteristic of AppleScript may have been a conscious decision on the part of its designers, I’d argue it hasn’t served us all that well. (I’d also argue that Automator is a partial acknowledgement of those failings.) John Gruber of Daring Fireball sums it up nicely in his recent posting:

the language syntax is optimized for English-likeness, rather than being optimized for making it clear just what the fuck is actually going on.