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Comment by EsportToys | Hacker News Reader

I personally use AutoIt a ton as a super fast way to quickly prototype GUIs. It's basically a really simple entrypoint for WinAPI.

Shameless plug: my script for emulating a trackball with your keyboard [0], and my tray app for quickly tweaking your cursor speed (usually for when I'm drawing something)[1]

There are also some really useful utility apps like WhyNotWin11[2] that's made entirely using AutoIt

  [0] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse
  [1] https://github.com/EsportToys/MouseTray
  [2] https://github.com/rcmaehl/WhyNotWin11

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The problem with AutoIt is it's openly hostile community.

What community it does have is extremely and openly hostile towards newbies and non-programmers. To the point where browsing their forums has become a huge turn-off, and definitely has rejected folks trying to learn programming and/or AutoIt.

Even experienced programmers sometimes ask "dumb" questions... and the hostility they're met with is unacceptable.

Oh, interesting, I wasn’t aware of how the community were, since their documentation is quite thorough and self-contained that I’ve never had the need to check their forums (on top of the language being quite straightforward). I learned entirely from the inline samples provided in every page of their documentation.

I have a mixed experience. Sometimes I got an insulting answer, and sometimes a throughout one.

My personal baseline for a toxic community is the Golang one on Stack Overflow. So far the AHK form is better.

AHK is great from what I've seen. It's AutoIt that's the problem. AHK was originally a fork of the FOSS version of AutoIt, before AutoIt went closed and proprietary.

A lot of the toxicity on the AutoIt forum seems to come from the grossly overinflated egos of few core participants (some of which appear to be employees in some capacity). Reading through the forum, you can easily get the impression these people believe AutoIt is better than sliced bread or something... and anyone needing to ask a question is simply dumb.

It's rotten to the core. People should use AHK whenever possible.

I dunno, I find AHK's syntax really hard to wrap my head around, whereas AutoIt is simplistic enough that I never had to even bother with the forums in the first place, the built-in helpfile basically has everything I needed.

Objectively, the syntax for both are horrible (based on BASIC I believe, but still). Magic numbers, hex numbers, huge number of function parameters, obfuscated parameter/variable names, etc. It all leads to barely readable spaghetti code even in the most well-written UDF examples. And... good luck trying to get anything but the blessed-but-insufficient-for-serious-work IDE to work for you.

Help files are decent... but if you need help with a concept/idea/implementation - you are much better served to seek that help anywhere except from AutoIt or their forums. Which is sad.

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