Yes, I do think AppleScript’s well-intentioned “Englishness” is inadvertently obfuscating, although I’ve had a lot of fun using it over the years.
As you already have all the concepts in place, it might be worth experimenting with JavaScript for Applications once you install Yosemite. It feels in a way slightly late in the day to start putting a lot of work into making sense of Applescript, especially given the broken or defective nature of its record type, and its dependence on 3rd party fixes for some library basics like regexes.
( AS records can’t tell you what keys/fields they’ve got, and raise errors if you test them to find out )
Thanks for the suggestion. I will most likely dive into JXA as soon as I upgrade to Yosemite.
Is JFA intended to be a full replacement, or alternate, to AppleScript?
IOW, should I be able to do anything in JXA that I can do now in AppleScript?
Does JXA use, or access, the AppleScript API provided by an app?
Yes, they use exactly the same library interfaces – it's just a set of alternate syntaxes for accessing them. Anything reachable by AS is equally reachable by JXA.
The Yosemite .sdef library viewer now allows you to switch between three viewing syntaxes:
Rather than continue our off-topic discussion about learning AppleScript and JXA here, I have started a new topic. Please continue your excellent posts here:
Following other folks' efforts to use JXA since its inception I've noted that a number of things were (or still are) broken, however Chris Nebel and Chris Page at Apple have been working hard at improving AppleScript infrastructure — so I expect things to keep improving.
Yes, I am sure it will continue to develop, but in my experience ver 1.0 is already an excellent resource. FWIW I have written a fair amount of it by now without hitting any glitches : -)
( The NSXML access took me a while to figure out :- )
There was some active grumbling on various forums by someone who (it turned out) had written their own JavaScript bridge which they felt Apple should have used.
The word ‘broken’ was used fairly vehemently, but there wasn’t enough detail for me to get a sense of any specifics.
I don’t know what the technical merits of the argument were, or why Apple apparently declined the offer, but I’ve personally found JXA an excellent medium to work in, and I’ve always been able to make all the calls to application automation interfaces without any problems.
The core JavaScript language interpreter is, of course ( after so many years of browser competition) very highly optimised and battle-hardened.
That's actually Hamish Sanderson co-author of one of the best AppleScript books and developer of appscript.
While he definitely has an ax to grind with Apple (and others) he probably is one of the top five most knowledgeable people in the world of the deep mechanics of AppleScript and Apple-Events.
Note:I'm not saying JXA is broken — I'm just giving fair warning that people should be aware this technology is very young on OSX and not everything has worked smoothly — especially in the early days. One specific issue that comes to mind is: Subject: JXA failure with delay function.
This I believe is supposed to be fixed in El Capitan.
Personally I'm quite looking forward to using some of JavaScript's goodies, and I think I'll like the syntax once I get used to it.
Sounds like you have the reverse problem I have. You know AppleScript extremely well and it sounds like JavaScript is something new. I'm just the opposite.
I'll probably upgrade to Yosemite very soon, knowing what I know now about JXA. It's been about a year since Yosemite was released.
