[toast0]

> Hypercard maybe had the language thing figured out: use english as a base?

I wrote some stuff in applescript, which is similar / descended from HyperTalk. I would say it's the worst language I've used; it's so hard to use because of pretending to be natural. It doesn't help when Apple forgot how to write documentation somewhere around 2008, so there's no authoritative docs, and it's unsearchable because it looks like english words.

Literally anything else would be preferable, but applescript is the best way to automate MacOS. Thankfully, I only had to use it once.

[recursivedoubts]

applescript was a nightmare with zero autocompletion and a ton of magical strings and bad syntactic choices, some inherited from hypertalk, some not

i don't think an english-derived scripting language would be a bad thing (well, I wouldn't, since I created https://hyperscript.org, now would i?) if the tooling was good, I don't see a huge difference between someone dragging and dropping a for loop and an if statement and just typing

  for thing in whatever
    if the thing's field is false
      do something