AppleScript
It's great that the new Apple, led by Steve Jobs, has decided to hold on to and develop the AppleScript advantage. It's a good smart move. Graphic operating systems need system-level scripting. We realized this shortly after the release of the Mac OS in the mid-80s. Where's the batch language? We wanted one.I encourage Apple to think broader than AppleScript. It's going to be native soon. That's good! But we were there in 1993. Frontier has been native for all this time. It's faster than today's AppleScript. When they ship the new native version, our interpreters will run at similar rates.
But Frontier has so much more than AppleScript. A full set of tools. Fast verbs for managing the file system and local area networks. An object database. An outliner. Multi-threaded runtime. It's a web server. And its all built around scripting, Frontier also runs AppleScript along with our own UserTalk.
I wish someone at Apple would read Matt Neuburg's book on Frontier 4.2.3 for the Mac. See all the culture there? We're just getting started on this stuff on Windows. The Mac version of Frontier will be richer than the Windows version for quite some time to come.
Some encouragement, some air cover from the platform vendor would be welcome. MacWEEK presents an interesting case. We haven't lost our interest in the Mac platform. As a developer, we're stronger if there's value in both of our implementations. Many of our Mac users are still there, on the Mac, slugging it out for the platform, despite all the crazy news coming from Cupertino.
One of the things that's not crazy is the new focus on system scripting. It's important! We're still here. One more time, Apple, want to work with us to develop this market as a Mac advantage?
And no matter what Apple does, we'll make the Mac platform a full citizen in the content management system we're developing around Frontier 5.
Dave Winer
March 21, 1998
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This page was last built on 3/21/98; 3:24:46 PM by Dave Winer. dave@scripting.com |