Religion of the Word

In the NYRB, Edward Mendelson suggests that there is a little zone of Protestant freedom within the controlled Papal structures of Apple:

“AppleScript is protestant with a lower-case ‘p,’ as iOS and much of OS X is catholic with a lower-case ‘c.’ Like the Protestantism of the Great Reformation, AppleScript emphasizes autonomous individual thought; most AppleScripts perform actions that only the individual author of the AppleScript might ever want to perform—something as simple as, say, switching on an Internet radio station and switching it off at midnight, or as complicated as the paradigm-shifting example I’ll describe later. Like Protestantism, AppleScript relies on the spare, unillustrated medium of printed text; while iOS and much of OS X, like Roman Catholicism, emphasizes visual imagery and strict canons of behavior and belief. AppleScripts are visible only in the form of plain words—ornamented only with color-coding that identifies words as nouns, verbs, or other forms of speech—but with none of the icons and animations that enliven (but do not enlighten) the rest of Apple’s world. (Steve Jobs said of OS X, ‘We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.’)”