Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8
by brudgers on Saturday January 17, 2015 @11:05AM
(#8904572)
The first computer I owned was an A500. In a box somewhere, I think there are all four of the 1.1 Rom Kernel Manuals...the ones sold in bookstores even after Amiga OS2.0 was well established.
Amiga OS was strongly influenced by Unix. That's what allowed all those ports of Unix commands to fill the FredFish disks. In a sense the Amiga was what a company needed to do when buying a Super Bowl launch ad spot isn't on the table. The Amiga 1000 was beautifully engineered but aesthetics were low enough on the priority list that the sidecar made it to market.
One could make a case that all that Rexx integration was a waste of effort: The Amiga died for just about everyone but a few hardcores and software like Photoshop lives on. The ball of mud is the most successful software architecture by volume.
You may be right that this is how it happened, but there's not really any reason for it to have happened that way.
E.g. on the Amiga, which had similar hardware constraints to that, a lot of apps did work similarly to the way you describe AutoCad: everything internally mapped to commands, and the commands operated on the data model and updated the view, and while they were not designed to run headless, they were often designed from the beginning for everything to be scriptable.
This was done because everyone expected the API - from about AmigaOS 2.0 onward, if you didn't have an AREXX API it'd be commented on negatively in reviews etc.
I think the difference is the lack of a culture for scripting. Even with AppleScript, there's not the same culture for scripting in the Mac world. Even less so in the Windows world (outside of developers). Unix users expect scripting and components designed for it. Amiga users expected scripting of gui apps too.