In the early 90's, Apple had big plans for end-user programming. Larry Tesler, the head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group, gathered people from ATG and elsewhere at Apple who were working on aspects of end-user programming for a project code-named Family Farm. The idea was that most of the pieces that were needed for end-user programming were already working or close, and that with a few months of work they could integrate them and finish the job.
The project sputtered when (1) it became clear that it was going to take more than a few months, and (2) Tesler was largely absent after he turned his attention to trying to save the Newton project.
AppleScript was spun out of the Family Farm project, and William Cook's paper [1][pdf] includes some of the history, including its relationship to Family Farm and HyperTalk, HyperCard's scripting language.
AppleScript shifted the focus from creating something that end users without previous programming experience could easily use to application integration. I was a writer who worked on both Family Farm and AppleScript, and I was both surprised and hugely disappointed when AppleScript was declared finished when it was obviously not suitable for ordinary users. I assumed at the time that there had been no usability testing of AppleScript with ordinary users, but Cook's paper claims there was. All this was even more disappointing in light of the fact that so much more could have been learned from the success of HyperCard and HyperTalk, and that the HyperCard developer and champion Kevin Calhoun was just around the corner.
The Wikipedia article on HyperCard [2] gives the history of the product, including the pettiness of Steve Jobs in cancelling it.
While the Hypercard discontinuation in 2004 can be viewed as petty, that was quite late in its life. I think this article neglects many of the developer gifts that came back into the Apple fold via the NeXT merger which Steve Jobs can legitimately take some credit for. Cocoa was a major development which is completely ignored here. Also, the evolution of the World Wide Developer's Conference, and its supporting materials is not covered in the article as well.
While NeXT UI frameworks can be considered great to be made available to an wider audience via OS X and Cocoa, similar ideas were already mainstream on the Windows world via Visual Basic and Delphi, and much widespread in terms of bringing programming to the people.
The project sputtered when (1) it became clear that it was going to take more than a few months, and (2) Tesler was largely absent after he turned his attention to trying to save the Newton project.
AppleScript was spun out of the Family Farm project, and William Cook's paper [1][pdf] includes some of the history, including its relationship to Family Farm and HyperTalk, HyperCard's scripting language.
AppleScript shifted the focus from creating something that end users without previous programming experience could easily use to application integration. I was a writer who worked on both Family Farm and AppleScript, and I was both surprised and hugely disappointed when AppleScript was declared finished when it was obviously not suitable for ordinary users. I assumed at the time that there had been no usability testing of AppleScript with ordinary users, but Cook's paper claims there was. All this was even more disappointing in light of the fact that so much more could have been learned from the success of HyperCard and HyperTalk, and that the HyperCard developer and champion Kevin Calhoun was just around the corner.
The Wikipedia article on HyperCard [2] gives the history of the product, including the pettiness of Steve Jobs in cancelling it.
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard