| Oh well, "other platforms" -- if that means Linux of course you have to learn those same things, but you undoubtedly already know them. If it means Windows, I'd rather drive a truck, and I'm thinking particularly of potential users who feel the same way. There are a lot of programming environments on the Mac besides Applescript that work from the GUI without any need to delve. Runtime Revolution and Breve are two examples that come to mind immediately. I'm thinking, for example, of someone who has worked in one of those very-high-level environments and wants to deepen her/his understanding and control. Turn to C, or rather C++? Oh dear. So how about Python? I think it's a great, an ideal choice. These are the people who, 25 years ago, would have picked up Turbo Pascal and gotten a great start on a lifelong obsession. Python should get them (and vice versa). But while Tiger comes with Python, the moment you look for (for example) a GUI library, you learn that there's a much-superior Python (2.4), for which you can download a nice, familiar binary from Bob's site or from ActiveState. Good. And you can download a binary of (for example) wxPython. Good. And then you have to do this Terminal stuff. No, the Terminal stuff isn't difficult. You find out (though as I recall it is *not* immediately obvious) that there are only a few simple things you need to learn to do. The point is that you're now engaged, however peripherally, with a whole other huge set of questions and conditions, and suddenly the learning curve for Python *looks* much steeper. The problem, as I see it, is that you encounter this stuff right at the very beginning. Everything for getting started with Python is off-the-shelf easy -- except of course that to get it running you just have to add the following lines to your profile and . . . what?? You start looking at docs, and quickly encounter references to directories that you can't even find among the folders on your OSX filesystem. Of course OSX is Unix "under the hood"; but not everybody -- not even everybody interested in programming the Mac -- has gone into the dark spaces under the hood. The alternative to "under the hood" includes a lot more than just pushing buttons to get & send email, though this may be hard to remember once you've gone under the hood . . . I don't know, maybe I was just traumatized at an early age (or rather a late one). I got over it, and I suppose everyone else can too. I'm the wrong person to ask. Maybe linda.s might have a more useful perspective at this point? Charles On Feb 6, 2006, at 10:06 AM, Kevin Walzer wrote:
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