As usual a lot of discussions about AppleScript are about the english-like syntax, adopted for inexperienced users, less than the - in theory - amazing object based App scripting.

Fun fact: Apple in 1991 in fact planned to have alternative dialects of AppleScript, meaning divorcing the logic of the script from its textual representation and storing the script in a language-independent representation.

One application would have been internationalization, instead of writing english-like writing in french-like or japanese-like and early 90s Apple seem to have released those dialects for a little time, although they depended on localization of the AppleScript dictionaries of the scriptable apps.

Also planned was a Professional Dialect, but sadly not released. According to William Cook, creator of AppleScript (the language/dialect) that would have look something like this:

English-like dialect:

  the first character of every word whose style is bold

French-like dialect:

  le premier caractère de tous les mots dont style est gras

Professional dialect:

  { words | style == bold }.character[1]

I would have really liked something like that. One wonders what would have been. William Cook himself believes in hindsight that AppleScript should have adopted the professional dialect.

AppleScript from Mac OS X onwards had adopted the Open Script Architecture with bridges which can be awkward because of some mismatches between features and syntax of the bridging language. Even Javascript (JXA), the most prominent, needs a somewhat awkward `whose` function to replicate the builtin filtering of AppleScript.

[1] Cook’s paper about AppleScript: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf