Is AppleScript dead?
Developer Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch kicked off his annual C4 indie Mac developer conference in Chicago on Friday night with a provocative claim cribbed from Steve Jobs: He showed a slide of the AppleScript logo in a coffin and declared it dead.
As with Jobs when he declared Mac OS 9 dead back in 2002, Rentzsch was making a point to a group of developers. In this case, Rentzsch was using JSTalk, a JavaScript-based method of scripting applications implemented by Flying Meat Software’s Gus Mueller in his image-editing app Acorn, as a call to arms for developers to embrace a new system for scripting applications and to stop focusing on AppleScript.
It’s an interesting point of view, and one that was tailored to Rentzsch’s audience, since adding AppleScript support to apps is hard and professional computer programmers are comfortable with more formal languages like, say, JavaScript.
I will admit that I’m deeply skeptical of the entire suggestion, not because I think AppleScript is a great language—though I use AppleScript every day, I am painfully aware of how difficult it can be to use—but because I’m concerned that programmers might not truly grasp that their customers aren’t as comfortable writing complex syntax full of brackets and semicolons as they are.
AppleScript, for all its faults, is a language that most power users can understand if they open a script and stare at it for a while. (Its great failing is that this is basically the only way to learn AppleScript.) I can stare at perl or JavaScript for a while and still end up not quite understanding what I’m looking at. Find out more…
