wrong, most of the time. That is the cost of those options. Of course a small fraction of the time, one of those options is far superior than the others, and you get a pay off. Geeks and Unix people live for that -- finding the perfect tool. So on the Mac people choose AppleScript 90% of their time to do scripting (with maybe an augmentation tool or two to help) -- it is a higher level tool, easier to use, and in many high-level ways, it is more powerful. Unix people still war over what is the best shell and scripting language -- with 90% of the time it not mattering (or not mattering enough to justify the choice). The remaining 10% of the time, you can add that tool to the Mac anyways -- but at least there was A (one) standard to begin with. But in some low-level ways, you can do more with the Unix tools, with only 5 times the effort -- and for some task (rarely) there is a gain by using the specialized tool. Conclusion The point is not to trash Unix. It's versatility and power are second to none. The Low-Levels of Unix make it a programmers paradise -- and a god-send to the control freaks who want to be able to tweak their own kernel, or modify timing issues on their networking stack. It took 20 years, but a fair amount of Unix features did get one standard (POSIX) -- of