Seeing how much functionality I could get from just 400 LoC was one of the motivations for writing this post.

Short answer, yes I am a Mac guy. AFAIK, both AppleScript and Shortcuts/Intents are mechanisms Apple has provided to support orchestration between apps. I do not consider them “malleable computing” mechanisms as they do not allow for adapting and reshaping the apps themselves. That said, AppleScript and Shortcuts are only as useful as the support given to them by 3rd party apps, which IMHO has always been mid.

If you're into malleable computing you'd never have been a "Mac person"

Hammerspoon (Mac) is much better. It's basically Lua, with access to all the MacOS automation APIs.

2.0 fixes a ton of stuff over 1.0, but yeah you're not wrong.

Between custom keybinds, hot strings, and pop-up menus I have literally hundreds of tiny AHK scripts running 24/7. I'm pretty sure there's stuff I've literally forgotten is an AHK vs an actual part of Windows. It's all just ingrained in my muscle memory at this point.

In a way this is what Powershell offers in Windows.

On Mac using something like PyObjC, maybe coupled with Xonsh, could do the trick.

The Smalltalk approach doesn't really integrate well with anything else.

If you treat data and code the same, it's hard to separate code from data. If you're writing a program for a single machine on which it should be used, that's fine, but if you want to write your code once and run it across many machines, that's a problem.

ERP systems are a bit like this; system owners (businesses) are often able to change any part of the system they want. Predictably, this makes version upgrades an incredible pain and often locks companies into an unsupported proprietary fork of a 20-year-old version of their CRM.

> how did we go back to dead text files again?

We never went away from it. It's how a significant amount of computer use has always been. Smalltalk, Oberon, Lisp Machines (mentioned by sibling), they were always minority systems.

There was a brief time when maybe home computers could have leaned this way, but that lasted until VisiCalc. What sold computers was software that turned them from clay to be molded by the user into a defined tool. People prefer appliances (or were convinced to prefer appliances), and appliances make more money for businesses than distributing programs as a Smalltalk package would have.

> I genuinely do wonder why that has been the trajectory.

The simple answer here is still likely the best one: Smalltalk and Lisp Machine systems were expensive and proprietary right at the same time that Unix and C became free (and therefore ran everywhere)