Quick Tutorial – Introduction

Welcome to the BushelScript Quick Tutorial!

This set of documents is intended to teach BushelScript as quickly as possible by focusing on core concepts, syntactic elements, and runtime infrastructure. It's like a Learn X in Y minutes but with a bit more polish.

Parallel documents

For each tutorial page, there is a parallel page in the Language Reference that covers the topic in greater depth and with more detail. Each page contains a "see also" link to its Language Reference companion.

Please note that this guide is unfinished and will be updated over time. In the meantime, the Language Reference is complete for the current release; please consult it as appropriate.

The BushelScript scripting language

BushelScript is a macOS scripting language designed with the following principal goals in mind:

• Be useful:
  • Displace AppleScript for most practical AppleEvent scripting.
  • Supersede AppleScript as "the ultimate duct tape" by integrating with tons of different scripting interfaces.
  • Add practically useful features on top of an AppleScript-lookalike base.
• Be predictable:
  • Be open-source and driven by the community.
  • Be straightforward to read and minimally confusing to write and debug.
  • Avoid obscure, lacking or useless features.
• Be accessible:
  • Don't force novice scripters to read code with unintelligible symbols.
  • Don't force experienced programmers into a natural language paradigm.
  • Avoid alienating non-English speakers.
  • Seamlessly translate between programmer/user registers and different natural language bases.

Versions and variants

This tutorial uses version 0.6 of the "BushelScript English"/bushelscript_en language.