Autohotkey vs. AutoIt

Posted by Fredy
Sep 5, 2012 at 10:53 AM

Again, a little misunderstanding, Slatibartfast, and I didn’t even understand why I would have said that “a viable tree structure” would be important in a programming or script language, since if there is any in your scripts (in both) - which then can be replicated / really “shown” by technical means in an editor like emEditor, e.g., but not so much in “folding-only” editors -, it’s made by your own programming / scripting structure, e.g. by your putting things into sub-routines, under headings, sub-headings, and, in scripting and perhaps for many programming tasks also, under a system of “structured, parented” global variables - the script/programming language itself has nothing to do with it (whilst many macro system, e.g., don’t even allow for such a system since they lack global variables and / or if-structures) - in order to do “good work”, I personally and absolutely NEED tree structures, cf. my current thread on using “outliners” or even mindmap applications to do programming, design AND real code - but again, this is not a “language” problem insofar as there might be working environment for specific languages that offer most of what I’m looking here for within external tools I try to combine.

Back to initial question, I searched for the term you don’t like in my little comparison, and heureka! This is an “outliner” forum, so if you speak off-topic, you must force a (natural or artificial) connection between what you’ve got to say and “outliners” (in a broad sense though), and there is Prof. Manfred Kuhn with his blog “takingnotenow” (“note” in singular!) who “advertized” both AHK and CT, and I was referring to the latter here, and also I said I’m ambivalent about his hint to the former - in fact, I have the feeling that if I knew AI better, then perhaps I could use AI even for “normal macro purposes” and wouldn’t be in my current “need” to use AHK, in order to get easy text expansion (where one of the probs is you’ll constantly do lots of changes, extensions, so you need quick access and quick rebuilding); as for AHK’s easy way of key bindings, this is quickly put into perspective once you’ll use global “scope” / “context” variables / other means of scope or context in either script language, since then your whole construction will perhaps be turned upside down anyway, cf.

http://www.autohotkey.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=91871

so that the advantage of AHK would be reduced to have (much) quicker initial “results” when you can’t start from a functional “standard” script from somebody else in which you’ll then make all the necessary amendments “by example” - hence the big market for commercial (and mostly far inferior) “macro tools” where you get initial results within minutes (which would be possible with either AHK and AI if there were such “start from here” scripts easily available in either.

Another (totally unnecessary) problem is AI forum’s paranoia vs. possible “game scripting misuses” of that language, and almost total censorship in that direction, which means that when you ask questions there in order to have your “outliner” enhanced, you’ll get heavy reprimanding THAT (= not why) game scripting isn’t allowed! And this ridiculous phenomenon heavily impedes your ability, as an AI newbie, to do your very first key binding to start with, whilst in AHK, you do a “^t:: command”, and you’re done. Thus, saying that the AI crowd seems to remain “select” - “programmers only please, no laymen who don’t know nothing about what we do here” -, would not be totally diffamatory, it seems.

In the end, it comes to “how to do easy text expanding with AI also”, and then - if you know both programs well and need elaborate scripting - you wouldn’t look back at AHK I fear, since it’s too much hampered by its “micro syntax folly” and absence of standard array processing, whilst you could finally do with its “macro syntax” idiosynchrasies - and, there are lots more of “commands”, etc. (= inbuilt functions, etc. - string processing is particularly poor in AHK, and hampered by its “micro syntax” issues on top of that!) in AI’s commands list. Many people say they don’t like AI’s syntax because of its “Visual Basic” character / similitude - ok, but “anything” is better than what AHK has to offer instead.

Thus, my conclusion was, I started for my “normal” scripting needs - “macros” over all applications, not special tasks within a multiple text files environment for data processing - with AHK, and here, with now some 3,000 lines of code (without even having started text expansion here), I’m a little bit stuck with it for now, all works very well, but I’d prefer to have it all within AI, on condition that I could do easy text expansion there as well.

There isn’t the slightest doubt that one, AHK is the much more “accessible” script language for a non-programmer, and that two, for heavy scripting, AI is indeed the superior language, and be it for the fact alone that your code, for sophisticated tasks, will be much more compact, whilst in AHK, you must first overcome many little (and totally unnecessary) problems for which you’ll do a lot of additional (unnecessary) coding.

As said, AI, by the men behind it (and who can be exceptionally rude then), clearly doesn’t want to be a “general use macro language”, “beginners stay off, please”, but for anybody willing to cope with this, it seems to offer the far better scripting possibilities. Hence my current being stuck with the need to concurrently use both languages, which cannot be it long-term.

As for any tries to “virtually design” the perfect scripting language, this bumps into the same barrier as we encounter with “perfect outliners” or whatever: The developers of the existing stuff just do their thing, the market is “taken”, and even for totally obvious follies that are evident to everyone, they won’t even discuss abolition but insist of preserving their marks. There is certainly a more viable approach: Enhancement of the fori, installing a tree structure (again!) in them, not allowing any more “help me!” posts, but fractionizing and clear denomination / classification of questions for help, etc., and then category structures with cloned threads, both for technical problems within the language and for applications to spice up, with such standard scripts, i.e. bringing order into the current chaos of such fori as AHK’s, with currentloy about 70,000 different threads in which searching, most the time, is fruitless.

I’m saying, at the end of the day, most people would need rather similar things, in identical / similar applications, and today, there is nothing provided for this underlying need structure, meaning incredible amounts of wasted time, both on the asking as on the responding side. The web itself is a mess, and this absence of structure is propagated into the depths of most of the sites constituting it.