Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

On 11/20/24 10:46 AM, Rich wrote:

186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

   NEVER liked JS or Perl ... but that's just me.
   Real-world, they seem to do their thing OK.

 
If JS or Perl are your yardstick for "never liked" you must never have
attempted to write an AutoHotKey script to automate something on a
windows machine.

 
  Tried a hotkey daemon once, DOS-era, but eventually
  bought one writ by better programmers. Automated
  Winders ... again a real pain in the ass. DOS was
  better at that.

Automating a GUI is usually a major PIA.

The entire language looks like three shit-faced drunk language
designers teamed up with three stoned off their gourd language
designers and agreed to create the script language, and each put in
their own alcohol or mary jane fueled idea of how the language
should be designed.
 
There's absolutely no consistency in anything in that language.  One
thing one has to pass around are WID's (Window ID's) so that the
target window which is to receive the "automation" is identified. 
Some functions have prototypes like this (note, these are made up
below):
 
getxy(wid, result)
 
Others have prototypes like this:
 
move_to_x_y(x, y, wid)
 
Others are this way
 
recolor-window(x, wid, y, color, result)
 
Still others use camel case
 
getSomethingFromWindows(result, a, b, wid, q)
 
Note now "wid" moves around in the prototype list, yet it is needed for
nearly every call.  Also note the underscore vs. hyphen vs camel case
names.

 
  I take it you're also not a fan of Perl  :-)

I wrote my share of Perl in a world long ago.  I never had the
visiceral reaction to it that some Perl haters have had however,

AutoHotKey, however, was another several orders of magnitude above
Perl.  Perl is just filled with "special characters that have special
meanings", but the meanings are at least consistent.  $ is always
'scalar', % is always key value map, etc.  AutoHotKey, however, would
have had % mean seven different meanings in the seven different places
it might be used to mean something.

  Hey, working with X stuff you also need to identify
  screens sometimes ... and they're not always readily
  identified - <something>:2:2

That was a given.  What was asinine was some functions expected "winid,
x, y" as parameter order, others wanted "x,y,winid", still others did
"x,winid,something, y" and still others wanted "y, something1, x,
something2, winid).  There was no consistency, anywhere, with any order
of parameters or of what parameters were always present.  It literally
was as if drunk and stoned designers just threw crap at a wall, and
whatever stuck to the wall became the AutoHotKey script language.