Autohotkey vs. AutoIt

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Sep 3, 2012 at 10:59 PM

@Fredy:
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
The thing is, I found what you wrote - your rationale as to which is better - to be *very* interesting, but I had thought you seemed to be genuinely mixing up or confusing the 2 distinct terms:
(a) “scripting language” and
(b) “programming language”.

If you were confusing them, then I couldn’t see how the discussion could really develop in a constructive/useful way. From experience, any discussion which uses confused/ambiguous or poorly-defined terms would probably tend to suffer similar constraints. There are probably plenty of examples of such, on this and other forums.
For example, and as you wrote:
“There are many “AHK vs. AI” posts in the web, but most of them are simply too much biased in order to be worthwile”.

What you wrote is true, and I don’t really see any value in repeating that sort of a discussion.
But that is why I found the rationale you used in your post interesting - you seemed to be taking the effort to discuss the two things (AHK v. AI) rationally and in an objective manner. However, scattered in your post were some implicit/subjective assumptions - i.e., not stated/substantiated assumptions.
For example: “...but is missing the most important feature of them all, a viable tree structure.”

On reading that last bit, I immediately thought: “What does that mean? Why is a tree structure important? Why is that necessarily the *most* important? When did priority come into this, and why? What does “viable” mean?”
I decided that these things probably reflected your implicit opinion/POV/bias - and I was not interested in discussing whose POV was strongest.

This is why I suggested at the end that:
“t would be interesting to see a formalised set of requirements for a scripting language, but I am unaware of any such - I haven’t come across one in any event.
If we had a set of requirements, then we could use it as a basis for comparison and rapidly tick off whether script language A or B met the requirements, and to what extent.”

If you would like to work with me and other interested parties to draft up such a thing - an objective set of requirements criteria for a scripting language - then we would probably be able to run any existing scripting language through the criteria to establish a checklist of:
(a) Which criteria it met.
(b) To what extent it met the criteria.

That might have the potential to be a tremendously useful exercise for anyone seeking to find a scripting language that met their peculiar criteria. It could help to show the flaws in existing scripting languages, thus pointing constructively to areas for potential improvement. The purpose of such an approach would be a generic and objective analysis of and focus on requirements criteria - not a criticism of the flaws - for any scripting language, offering a powerful basis for comparison.
This could be a decidedly non-trivial exercise. Outside of program development. it is not how most people have likely been trained to think, so might not be of interest to too many people. As a basis for comparison, however, it could be widely useful.
I suspect it is not an original idea, and there may thus be a lot of work already done (e.g., Wikipedia?, university computer science departments) that could save us time.

This would initially start with a sort of knowledge-gathering exercise. To proceed and start to run discovery, we might be able to make good use of an OPEN collaborative working environment - e.g., Google docs, or similar. It would be a constipated process in a discussion thread such as this.

I hope this mostly makes sense or is of use.