Here’s a little screed I tried posting in Disqust. Not great, but I don’t have time to rewrite it right now.

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Evening Wired,

Well, that story was a bit of a hot mess. Wrong title, buried lede (Workflow! WWDC!), unfocused and confusing. At least until compared to one of my screeds—enjoy!

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1. Who’s the “One Apple Programmer [who] Got Apps Talking to Each Other” of your title? ’Cos it’s definitely not Sal Soghoian. Sal’s not, and never was, an “Apple Programmer”. He was an amateur AppleScript user and early evangelist, who lucked his way into his management job at Apple several years after Apple broke up the original AppleScript team. (More about Sal later.)

The Apple programmers who led the creation of AppleScript were William Cook and Warren Harris, who in turn were building on the HyperTalk language Bill Atkinson previously created for HyperCard and the Apple event IAC (Inter-Application, or Inter-Process, Communication) architecture then being developed for Apple’s first true multitasking Mac OS, System 7. Conceived around 1989, development started in ’91 and shipped in ’93, initially as a Pro extra, then as a standard feature from 7.1 on. Then Apple management gutted their department, reassigning half the team “to get OpenDoc ready to throw away” [as one internet wag drolly put it], and Cook and Harris quit in response. That the suddenly-orphaned infant AppleScript survived at all is a testament to its remarkable virtues; that using it causes as much hair-pulling as joy may be largely due to the subsequent lack of toilet training.

Dr Cook documented the full early history of AppleScript’s creation in the following paper:

www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf

Invaluable insights for anyone who wants to understand why Applescript was created and how it interacts with Mac desktop applications. (Hint: Unlike traditional object-oriented messaging systems—CORBA, DCOM, Distributed Objects, SOAP, etc—Apple event IPC uses RPC plus simple relational queries, more akin to SQL. VERY powerful, very user-oriented. Ubiquitously misunderstood.)

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2. I’m going to speculate here that Apple will announce a new cross-platform automation strategy at WWDC next week, built on the Workflow app and team they bought in a couple years ago; hence the timing of this article. In which case, you really should’ve made the hot new Workflow App and its ambitious team of indie creators the centerpiece of your article; not some old failed automation product manager whose old failed automation products are about to be ousted.

As to Workflow itself, if/when it ships, no doubt there will be much fanfare and many claims that it’s the greatest innovation since sliced bread, but the truth is: it’s weak sauce at best; a gilded cell at worst. There is a vast history of end-user computing and computer education for explorers and innovators to draw on; far too long to get into here, but TL;DR: Papert was Right. Workflow, Automator, Scratch, Windows Workflow Foundation, et al are works of evangelical techies who think the way to evangelize their idea of “programming” to #OrdinaryPeople is to slather some lickable lipstick on their beloved pig and present it as “Programming for the Rest of [You]”. Whereas ordinary people would think, “WTF would I ever want to lick a pig?”, and work from there.

Papert demonstrated decades ago(!) that the right way to make computing accessible is to shape the language to fit its users; and the right way to do that is to give users the power to grow and shape that language by and for themselves, by growing its basic vocabulary with their own words and phrases for expressing the ideas and behaviors that interest them.

In other words: don’t hand the user a predetermined set of tools to use, but rather give her the tools she needs to make her own tools to use. Workflow, Scratch, &co don’t merely fail to empower users this way; they don’t even try at all. The resulting software may be a glitzy, seductive App that provides a lower barrier to entry than “Real Programmer” languages, but with an extremely low, immovable ceiling too. Papert’s Logo derived from Lisp/Forth for a reason: that stuff scales. Today’s mainstream programming world knows and thinks in “C”, which does not.

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