[TxMt] Re: sublime text 2 (slightly OT)

[Lorin Hochstein]

On May 13, 2011, at 7:11 PM, Steve Steiner wrote:

> 
> On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Steve King <sking at arbor.net> wrote:
> On 2011-05-13 13:00, Mario "Kuroir" Ricalde wrote:
> I'm still locked with Textmate because I developed lots and lots of bundles and commands that save my day with the Ruby API TM provides. And as far as I know, ST just supports Python for doing that. Which to me is a deal breaker.
> 
> Most Mac apps support AppleScript to some degree, but then you're stuck programming in one of the worst languages known to man.  (IMHO, of course!)  
> 
> That's not an opinion, it's a fact.  BrainF*ck is probably worse, but at least it only has a few understandable rules.  
> 
> AppleScript is just random.  
> 
> Worst. Language.  Ever.
> 

AppleScript has the singular virtue of being easier to read than to write. John Gruber (of daringfireball.net) had a great post several years back on this topic in a post titled "The English-Likeness Monster". 

http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster

Key quote: 

"This is AppleScript at its worst. It was a grand and noble idea to create an English-like programming language, one that would seem approachable and unintimidating to the common user. But in this regard, AppleScript has proven to be a miserable and utter failure." 


Apple actually did some user testing of AppleScript (!), but it came too late in the implementation to have a real impact of the language. This was mentioned in: 

William R. Cook. 2007. AppleScript. In Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages (HOPL III). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-1-1-21. DOI=10.1145/1238844.1238845 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1238844.1238845

Personally, I use Appscript when I need to do automation: http://appscript.sourceforge.net/


Lorin
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