@beka_valentine applescript is under-marketed, perhaps, but it’s still right there in macOS I strongly suspect that there is a big element of revealed preference here. users programmed out of necessity but they always kind of hated it; while Apple makes their apps scriptable, relatively few third party developers do, for the same reason that APIs have been falling out of fashion generally. shout out to the ones that make it a headline feature though, such as the Omni Group
Adding AppleScript to an app used to be quite clunky. There were a bunch of classes encapsulating AppleScript verbs and so on that you had to wire up. About ten years ago, they added some reflection-based things that let you just expose an Objective-C class as a scripting interface. They also did the converse and made it easy to use AppleScript interfaces from Objective-C, which made it easy for one app to drive another without needing to embed AppleScript code as text that Objective-C code would then pass to another parser.
@david_chisnall @beka_valentine I have, admittedly, yet to make an app scriptable myself, so I am not sure how hard it would be, particularly in Python; I should definitely get around to that. I do wonder if this stuff exists in Swift?
I think most of the Objective-C stuff is bridged in Swift, but I’ve never tried using Swift seriously. And SwiftUI is such a huge step backwards that it’s hard to take the ecosystem seriously.