HyperTalk was brilliant because everything seemed to just naturally work. The grammar and object model were both highly intuitive – you really could just guess the right syntax.
AppleScript and HyperTalk are aesthetically very similar but every time I have to write something in AppleScript I get oddball parse errors that I can never decipher and I need to randomly try things until an approach succeeds (for reasons I don't understand) or I give up.
Where HyperTalk was friendly and forgiving, AppleTalk is punishing.
I loved HyperTalk, but my experience with it was that:
A. Almost any English sentence was grammatically valid.
B. Almost none of those sentences did what you expected.
I find AppleScript a more regular language overall. I think the biggest difference is that HyperTalk was built in to the HyperCard environment, and therefore most of the “language” was in fact just HyperCard-supplied functionality, whereas AppleScript has very little built-in functionality, and sometimes this surprises people when they discover that it’s up to some other application to decide what the behavior of the script is.
AppleScript and HyperTalk are aesthetically very similar but every time I have to write something in AppleScript I get oddball parse errors that I can never decipher and I need to randomly try things until an approach succeeds (for reasons I don't understand) or I give up.
Where HyperTalk was friendly and forgiving, AppleTalk is punishing.