Maurice Rickard's AppleScript Story
From Maurice Rickard, maurice@envirolink.org:I started scripting over three years ago with AppleScript, mainly for driving QuarkXPress. I switched to Frontier about a year and a half ago when 4.1 came out, and I recently trained some staff from the local newspaper in AppleScript, so I had to delve back into it. Some impressions:
You don't need to know that much to begin scripting with AppleScript because of the sentence-like syntax, but--a significant but from my point of view--after the beginning phase, when you're into the phase of wanting to do real work, AppleScript is much harder. What sent me to Frontier was that I was a) bumping my head against that 32k size limit on AppleScripts, and b) trying to do things with applications that should have worked, but didn't (like importing text into a Quark document), and I'd heard that Frontier was more powerful and flexible.
This, for me was a significant difference between AppleScript and Frontier: when I wanted to do real work, much of my time with AppleScript was spent trying to figure out how to talk to the application in the right way, and I didn't have much in the way of examples to go on. In Frontier, since every verb is a script (more or less) that can be called by any other script in the database, I was instantly surrounded with working examples. And once I learned that a verb name is also its address in the database, I realized that if I didn't understand what a verb did, I could jump to it, open its script, and learn.
An additional advantage was that I spent less time trying to dope out how to make applications behave, because I could frequently take data from some file, do what I needed to do in the Frontier environment (using the wp or string verbs, for example) and put it back. In AppleScript, I was frequently stuck trying to do things the application's way.
These observations probably aren't definitive--I'm sure there are ways for AppleScript people to get around some of the problems I had--but fwiw, they're one user's experience.
http://www.envirolink.org/homepp/maurice/
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