{"id":1920,"date":"2016-11-16T23:16:32","date_gmt":"2016-11-17T07:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=1920"},"modified":"2021-07-14T13:40:13","modified_gmt":"2021-07-14T20:40:13","slug":"end-user-programming-is-still-an-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/end-user-programming-is-still-an-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"End-user programming is still an experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Gruber<\/a>, on the departure of Sal Soghoian from Apple<\/a> and the apparent dissolution of the macOS automation team:<\/p>\n

Part of my argument for why I feel so much more productive on a Mac than an iPad revolves around the automation technologies that Soghoian\u2019s group developed. […] I find this to be a profoundly worrisome turn of events for the future of the Mac. […] On a personal note, I\u2019ve known Sal for a long time. I first met him at a WWDC in the early years of Daring Fireball.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I too met Sal\u00a0at WWDC years ago. (I knew one of the engineers on his team from grad school.) Even in 2008 I wondered about the future of the automation team, for the simple reason that the WWDC session on automation technologies was always scheduled in the smallest room, in\u00a0the last time slot, on the last day (when many attendees had already left town).<\/p>\n

I see these automation tools as experiments of sorts,\u00a0exploring\u00a0which\u00a0programming-like tasks users can accomplish without\u00a0needing to actually learn to program. AppleScript, for example, adopted an experimental English-language like syntax that aimed to be more approachable than other programming languages. Apple’s more recent Automator app used more of a graphical, lego-block approach. Both of these rely on other apps to surface third-party functionality in a way that is accessible to the automation tool. It’s not clear how many people ever really used these tools.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Mac moved over to Unix and gained 30 years worth of command-line automation tools. Now it’s often\u00a0easier to\u00a0copy and paste a Terminal command from a web search than it is to set up an Automator workflow. And the developer community continued to grow and ship new automation-related apps and scripting languages, for everything from text editing\u00a0to web design to\u00a0server\u00a0maintenance. So the Mac is not losing its ability to be automated \u2014 on the contrary, there are more ways to do\u00a0it than ever before.<\/p>\n

Now\u00a0Apple has thrown its weight behind different,\u00a0related efforts: it’s not hard to imagine\u00a0Siri becoming capable of many\u00a0of the things Automator could do (even Automator’s robot icon foreshadowed this). And perhaps Apple’s\u00a0Swift Playgrounds<\/em> app, designed to help anyone learn how to program,\u00a0can be seen as an assertion that previous automation technologies were\u00a0too limiting \u2014 you may as well\u00a0dive in and learn to code.<\/p>\n

I think it’s a testament to Soghoian’s commitment that the\u00a0automation tools team lasted as long as it did \u2014 and that the Mac has such an abundance of automation tools today. I’m not really sure what the team’s dissolution means for the future, but I think the space is still ripe for exploration. I hope Apple, Soghoian, and the developer community will continue to experiment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Gruber, on the departure of Sal Soghoian from Apple and the apparent dissolution of the macOS automation team: Part of my argument for why I feel so much more productive on a Mac than an iPad revolves around the automation technologies that Soghoian\u2019s group developed. […] I find this to be a profoundly worrisome … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “End-user programming is still an experiment”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1920"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2732,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920\/revisions\/2732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}