Re: Is Programming Obsolete?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 7 Apr 2024 16:51:22 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:
 

AutoHotKey is the most absymal "programming" languge ...

 
That is inherent in the nature of the problem it is trying to solve:
automate an interface--the GUI--which was never designed for automatic
operation. No matter how you slice and dice it, that kind of thing
inherently turns out to be fiddly and fragile.

But that part wasn't the problem.  AutoHotKey included function calls
to do that, and once one found the function call to perform "step x"
that one wanted, it worked.

The absymal part was the actual AuthHotKey script language itself.  It
looked to have been created by ten different people, at ten different
points in time, all of which decided to "do something differnt" for the
patch they were adding at the time they were adding it.

Perl gets grief for having too many sigils ($ for scalars % for
key-value maps, etc).

But, imagine a Perl where for "moving a window") the function call was
(and the $, %, ^ and *'s were require below)

  move-window-to-x-y( $win, %handle, ^x, *y)

Meanwhile, the function call to resize a window was (and the sigis
below were required, but no commas were allowed):

  ResizeWin( @oldw #oldh &win !newwidth ?handle :newheight)

And, note how the "win" variable needs to be dereferenced as $win for
one of the calls, but &win for the other, and the window handle is
%handle for one and ?handle for the other.

This kind of "fun" inconsistency in AutoHotKey's scripting language
makes it an absolute <sarcasm>Joy</sarcasm> to work with.

The manipulating of a GUI was actually the easy part.  The abysmal part
was the script language inconsistencies.