The unlikely persistence of AppleScript
First, a little history:
Apple acquired NeXT at the end of 1996, with the plan of using that company’s OpenStep operating system as the foundation for the future of Mac OS. The first plan for that OS was called Rhapsody, and the basic idea was that it was OpenStep with a Mac-like appearance.
The idea was to keep all the NeXT stuff and throw out all the Mac stuff. That idea did not fly—particularly with existing Mac developers. This forced Apple into a new plan, Mac OS X, which was a hybrid of NeXT and Mac technologies. That plan was more complicated and took significantly more time to implement—Mac OS X 10.0 didn’t ship until March 2001, and arguably wasn’t truly usable until 10.2 in May 2002—but it garnered the support of developers and Mac users.
Over the course of the intervening years, though, Mac OS X has evolved in a decidedly NeXT-skewed direction. Mac OS X technologies that began life at NeXT (such as Cocoa and Services) have thrived; technologies from the classic Mac OS (such as Carbon) have been deprecated and eliminated.
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