[FoRK] Leopard scripting: it's over, fuckers!

Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> on Fri Jan 11 18:53:32 PST 2008

Okay:

   http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/scriptingcocoa.html

So my REAL new year's resolution is not to *actually* switch to  
emacs, but to find and adopt a (higher-order) scriptable environment  
that I can live in most of the time.  Interactively:  can you meld  
shell and browser?  Shell and e-mail?  Where do you spend most of  
your time?

mouseHole in Ruby gave me the end-user-scriptable proxy-app  
environment I'd been talking about for ages, and proved that  
scripting the middle tier wasn't enough.  Greasemonkey gave us  
scriptability at the browser, yet didn't provide a true platform;   
and I use Safari besides, which means that I had to use Creammonkey,  
which wasn't, well, compliant enough.  Besides which, all these "add  
ons" are just that;  where the fuck is my truly scriptable browser,  
if that's where I spend most of my time?

Give me the ability to write an initial Python browser harness in as  
little code as it's been demonstrated that you can write on in ObjC  
using Cocoa --- and less!  And we're done.  I was thinking --- and  
the plan of action is still --- to use the (risky!  nascent!) nu  
language (ObjC meets Lisp) to do this, but perhaps... perhaps  
PyCocoa's sufficient!

Ruby has advantages:  semantically, it's more suited to building DSLs  
(and what I imagine is the mother of all DSLs, the awk of the Web)  
but Python...  well, either one would be fine, the latter more  
comfortable for me.

Things that one can build a minimal implementation of in less than  
100 lines of code in many languages / runtimes, these days:

   * p2p file sharing framework
   * web server
   * blog engine
   * wiki
   * IM server
   * web storage server

And now, maybe?

   * web browser


Conciseness...  everything, &c.

jb out


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