AppleScript (2006) [pdf]
I lament the modern dearth of natural-language scripts designed for normal people who have slightly higher engineering instinct than average but otherwise just want to use their computer. Different people notice the usefulness of such things in different places, but for me it was Minecraft server administration. You have thirteen year olds doing a &#x27;banging on the keyboard&#x27; level of management for game servers for eleven year olds, and who do not know the first thing about programming and would take years to get up and running with Java, but who have added to the server dozens of commands and idiosyncratic game mechanics with Skript, because Skript&#x27;s language is so fundamentally easy and approachable that just about anyone could make just about anything in it that they could conceptualize of the details for.<p>I really don&#x27;t think AppleScript&#x27;s primary application has vanished like many people seem to think it has. Desktop software may be on the decline, but that just means that something equivalent for web needs to exist. Every other day you hear about a business that had some major component, which finally broke, being a giant kludge of an Excel sheet. Those things don&#x27;t start because they&#x27;re the best tool for the job, they start because Excel&#x27;s approachable for non-programmers who can figure out how to make an algorithm work as long as you don&#x27;t call it an algorithm or force them to start with stdio. Flash had that property too, and the Internet is the lesser for its disappearance; it took so little effort for an animation to be turned into a game that so many animators decided to try. Nobody ever bothers making things like that anymore because everyone&#x27;s internalized this idea that anything like programming is as hard and as not worth targeting towards normal people as general programming.<p>I don&#x27;t know how to end rants.