Brent Simmon's on Apple Events
Brent Simmon’s has another wonderful piece, this time about Apple events called “The Under-Appreciated Awesomeness of Apple Events (the Technology)”:
An outside observer might think Mac users just use pretty — and pretty simple — apps, and that’s the whole story. But that completely misses the power and genius of Macs. I can’t think of another platform with the sheer level of automation power that OS X (now macOS) has.
This is the biggest misconception about the Macs. Conventional wisdom is that Macs are for users that don’t have the technical ability to run something like Linux (or at least don’t want the hassle). The truth is that AppleScript, combined with the Unix subsystem, has historically1 made OS X a more powerful programming environment than other platforms.
Now AppleScript is dying by attrition, presumably to be replaced by the technically inferior Shortcuts. Like with the keyboards and Touch Bar harming their laptop line, Apple is squandering their advantages.
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I have to add the “historically” caveat because Docker doesn’t run well on Macs (Docker on macOS spins up a Linux virtual machine rather than running natively). This is again due to Apple letting important parts of their operating system die by attrition. Slowly but surely, macOS is becoming a less recommendable platform for programming. ↩︎