Chapter 5. Introducing AppleScript

This chapter describes the AppleScript language in very general terms. What sort of language is it? What is it like to learn and to use? The chapter is informal, opinionated, and personal. It is also nonessential, so readers who don't want to know my thoughts about what AppleScript "feels like" and just want to get on with the facts can skip this chapter.

Why include such a chapter at all? Simply because the AppleScript language itself seems to call for some explanation. It's full of contradictions. Users frequently express a certain degree of exasperation with AppleScript. Often, it seems to make easy things hard and hard things all but impossible; a program that should take five minutes to write takes an hour. Yet at the same time AppleScript has some remarkably sophisticated features.

To learn a computer language is to sense, in some measure, the mental makeup of its creator. I don't really know who invented AppleScript or what the reasoning process was, but one definitely senses certain aims and ideas floating about in the background. They are great ideas, but they don't always seem quite to fit together, and there are some odd holes in how some of them have been implemented. It is this combination of characteristics in this particular way that gives AppleScript its peculiar flavor. This chapter tries to describe that flavor.