I love love LOVE LOVE added functionality to OSes and Applications. Hating a particular scripting or programming language is idiotic.

...unless the language in question is applescript, the world's only read-only language

to the LOVE LOVE guy: you obviously haven't done much programming if you don't hate any programming languages ;)

I know various programming languages and I can only hate bad-programming. I'm pretty sure you can write a very bad python script, and be sure I'll hate it ;-)
As for Appscript, seems a very interesting alternative, but I can't find real differences with AppleScript. If scriptability is not very well implemented in a particular app, what's the difference between calling it from A or B, if results are odd, at all? A simple syntax question? Or this Appscript is much better implemented than AppleScript? (concerning only to IAC, not the language itself)

I'm going to guess that the point is that some people (myself included) just like Python more than AppleScript, and more options are always a good thing. Moreover, some people (myself included) probably know a lot more Python than AppleScript and would rather not have to learn the AppleScript syntax. In general, if not necessarily in the Mac community, Python is much more widely known than AppleScript, so the ability to use it will be of use to anyone who already knows it and wants to script applications (myself included). ;)

> As for Appscript, seems a very interesting alternative, but I can't find real differences with AppleScript.

Appscript is designed to look and behave as much like AppleScript's own application scripting support as possible, so hopefully this is a good thing. :)

> Or this Appscript is much better implemented than AppleScript? (concerning only to IAC, not the language itself)

I'd say they're roughly equal at the moment. AppleScript has a few clumsy quirks with things like keyword collisions and always getting code to compile correctly. Appscript still has some rough edges and perhaps the odd bug still to be hammered out, but they'll be gone eventually. Both use the same system APIs to talk to scriptable applications, so ultimately both are only as good as the Mac OS and individual applications' scripting support allows them to be.

Of course, the biggest difference is that appscript allows you to write your scripts in Python, which is a much more powerful and robust language than AppleScript. Basic functionality like replacing text and sorting lists is built in, and there's a huge range of libraries freely available for math, regular expressions, XML, and most anything else you can think of.

As for appscript itself, perhaps the nicest advantage is its built-in interactive help system, which is great for exploring an application's terminology and object model. To demonstrate, type /usr/bin/pythonw to launch the Python interpreter in Terminal.app and import appscript using:

from appscript import *

To view the Finder's inheritance and relationship structures, type:
app('Finder').help('-i -r')

To view the full terminology for the folder class:

_.help('-t folder')

To view the current property and element values of the user's Home folder:

_.home.help('-s')

And so on. (Be warned: it gets addictive!;)

HTH

why do you hate applescript?

This is neat, but I still prefer applescript. Applescript is extremely easy to learn and is the most human language in existence. In the right hands applescript can be incredibly powerful. but for people who do prefer python, this is an excellent application.