Tuesday, September 27, 2005

The English-Likeness Monster

John Gruber:

In a “normal” programming language, the equivalent to “path to fonts folder from user domain” might be something like:

path_to("fonts folder", "user domain")

And the equivalent to “path of fonts folder of user domain” might be:

user_domain.fonts_folder.path

The point being that in most languages, these two calls don’t look at all similar. Which is a good thing, because they aren’t at all similar: one is a global command taking two parameters, the other is a property of a property of an object. AppleScript’s slavish devotion to English-likeness, on the other hand, gives us two very different syntax constructs that read, to humans, as though they’re semantically identical.

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