from the edge of the deep green sea

Each and every time I try to do something with Applescript, I swear I will never try to do anything else again with it. But then, eventually I need some simple task which should not take much to code (I think) and i say what the heck, and try it again.

I must be a masochist because I always come back to what really frustrates me. I just tried to create a script that will upload a file and copy the file’s name to the clipboard. It is not rocket science and should take no longer than 5 minutes…but in Applecript land, rules are different.

The first and foremost thing that pisses me off of this half-assed scripting language is that it has no debugger. How the hell are you supposed to find flaws in your scripts without a decent mechanism to debug?

I also find it it amazing that there is no way to specify a parameter you want to send to the damn thing while testing. This means that if you want to debug an application that acts when a file is dragged to the script, you need to either recompile and drop the file again and again and again, or comment out the drag and drop portion of your code and set a temporary variable only to find new bugs when you test your “working script” with the drag and drop code.

Finally it is BUGGGY AS HELL. In the absence of a debugger, I have to plague my code with “display dialog” message boxes all over the place. That is not the bad part, get this: The dialogs are not guaranteed to be displayed!! It is a completely random behavior and I’ve about had it today with this POS excuse for a scripting language.

APPLE: If you want people to actually take advantage of this “feature”, then do us all a favor an make it debuggable and stable for ****’s sake.