AppleScript, appscript, Scripting Bridge, and Automator
There’s way too much to summarize here, but Dr. Drang and Clark Goble have posted on these topics with insightful comments by Hamish Sanderson, Matt Neuberg, and Andrew Barnert.
I’m not quite as negative on Scripting Bridge as others, but that may only be because I haven’t used it as heavily. It works OK for my purposes, but it certainly seems unfinished, and I’m not satisfied with either the exception- or delegate-based error handling.
For a while, it seemed that AppleScript, with good framework and bridge support, could become really great for both users and developers. Instead, it’s kind of been in stasis. We have Automator and AppleScriptObjC, which didn’t really live up to their potential. And XPC is the new hotness, but (so far) it’s solving a different and narrower problem.
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My biggest problem with Scripting Bridge is how long it takes to translate an Applescript into Obj-C Scripting Bridge calls. It's just not intuitive and there's nothing like Appscript's ASTranslate. However there are other issues which others have harped about a fair bit. I can't say I'm an expert since I'm still learning Cocoa. But whereas I love most parts of Cocoa I've learned (other than how verbose things tend to be) Scripting Bridge always seems like it's getting in the way of solving the problem.
