in reply to Re: Where does Perl fit into OS X?
in thread Where does Perl fit into OS X?

AppleScript has the advantage that it's a little bit easier to learn for some folks, particularly non-programmers who view it as being more english-like.

The fact that it looks more like English causes more problems than it solves in my experience. Newbie's, hell experienced programmers too, find it harder to separate out the meat from the syntactic fluff.

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Re^3: Where does Perl fit into OS X?
by jhourcle (Prior) on Aug 15, 2005 at 15:27 UTC

    Perhaps 'easier to learn' isn't the right term ... 'less scary' would probably be more acurate -- there are a large number of people who are turned off when they see languages that rely heavily on punctuation and other symbol characters to do their work, just because they're not used to seeing it in their every day use. They see it, and are immediately turned off, which make it impossible to convince them that it's worth learning.

    You're right in that mistaking it for English can cause no end of headaches for people who don't understand the concepts of a 'Structured English' language, where you don't have as much freedom as with a true natural language. I wouldn't suggest that you try to write AppleScript without using Apple's 'Script Editor' which will quickly highlight some problems. Typically, I don't write Applescript from scratch--I use it to record my tasks, then go back and modify the script recorded to make it more generic.

    Those times that I've written AppleScript without recording, I've made heavy use of the Dictionaries feature in Script Editor.

[reply]
      This is excellent feedback to my first questions. I'm still hoping someone can elaborate a bit on my third. Cheers,
      Acolyte
      Studying at the feet of the masters
[reply]
        I'm still hoping someone can elaborate a bit on my third.

        To be honest I'm not sure I understand it :-)

        Do the Carbon API's or Cocoa framework take the place of some of the "glue" functions that Perl would have been used for when developing with C, C++ or Java?

        Carbon/Cocoa are APIs to various Mac-like things. You can use CamelBones as a bridge to Objective-C that will enable you to easily (or, at least, fairly easily :-) get Cocoa and Perl to talk together. But I don't see how this relates to '"glue" functions that Perl would have been used for when developing with C, C++ or Java?' - or even what such things are :-)

[reply]

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