John Udell says:

I like to imagine new OS system services. Yesterday, it struck me that a rules engine, logger, and debugger would be an appropriate bundle of stuff to generalize as a standard system service.

This would indeed be pretty cool. Basically you’d have what amounts to a scripting language (hopefully a very simple and straightforward one) built right into the operating system, and applications that took advantage of it would simply have hooks into the scripting engine. I’m not enough of an AppleScript user to know whether this is basically what AppleScript is. I know that back in the days when I used a Mac, you could extend and integrate applications easily with AppleScript. I haven’t seen anything like it since on Windows or Unix. Would it be easy for an email client on the Mac to let users write filtering scripts using AppleScript, and is this the sort of model Udell is talking about?

In any case, I’m very interested in anything that makes it easier to program and makes it easier for people to understand the practical reasons why one would want to program.