Earlier quoted context omitted.
How was OSA/AppleScript not an OS-level malleable computing layer?
I don't know first hand of anyone who ever used it for anything. Maybe I knew the wrong Mac users (mostly teachers).
Dave Winer's Frontier (UserTalk) is the piece these threads usually skip. Frontier 1.0 shipped in January 1992 -- the same month Apple finally held its one-day scripting developer conference, after years of canceling and restarting AppleScript.
Winer's history:
http://scripting.com/dwiner/historyOfFrontier.html
UserTalk wasn't bolted on. It was registered as an OSA dialect: Script Editor, HyperCard, Nisus ("Do Script"), and other OSA hosts could run UserTalk, not only Frontier.
Manual:
http://scripting.com/frontier/manual/chapter01.html
UserTalk as OSA dialect:
https://sbc.apeth.com/frontierDef/ch34.html
What made it malleable in practice: syntax is an outline (code and data are the same tree); object DB + interpreter + outliner in one app; and one of the most complete Apple Events client/server stacks on the Mac -- I used Frontier and Radio Userland to automate other apps heavily, often before their AppleScript dictionaries caught up.
So yes: OSA/AppleScript was malleable computing at the OS layer if you count UserTalk and HyperCard and scriptable apps, not only Apple's English-like syntax. AppleScript won the namespace; that doesn't mean nobody used the layer. SoftTalker's teachers weren't the crowd wiring Finder, FileMaker, HyperCard, and CGI with UserTalk.
Later the same core powered Manila, Radio Userland, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC. Short timeline:
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/02/22/a-brief-history-of-scrip...
I've posted about this at length before on HN — ThinkTank, MORE, UserTalk, Apple Events, Radio Userland, the whole outline-as-language lineage. Two long ones:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30871497
(on Excel / visual data models — why we still need "Google Trees", and how Frontier got there from MORE)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217472
(on Xanadu open source, Hugh Daniel in the winged cap, and why hypertext without a scripting language is hyper-crap)
Index post linking several of these threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170434
Excerpts from the first (30871497):
The thing that's missing from "Google Docs" is a decent collaborative outliner called "Google Trees", that does to "NLS" and "Frontier" what "Google Sheets" did to "VisiCalc" and "Excel".
And I don't mean "Google Wave", I mean a truly collaborative extensible visually programmable spreadsheet-like outliner with expressions, constraints, absolute and relative xpath-like addressing, and scripting like Google Sheets, but with a tree instead of a grid. That eats drinks scripts and shits JSON and XML or any other structured data.
Dave Winer ... originally developed a wonderful outliner on the Mac originally called "ThinkTank" and then "MORE", which later evolved into the "Frontier" programming language, and ultimately the "Radio Free Userland" desktop blogging and RSS syndication tool.
More was great because it had a well designed user interface and feature set with fluid "fahrvergnügen" that made it really easy to use with the keyboard as well as the mouse.
After the success of MORE, he went on to develop a scripting language whose syntax (for both code and data) was an outline. Kind of like Lisp with open/close triangles instead of parens! It had one of the most comprehensive implementation of Apple Events client and server support of any Mac application, and was really useful for automating other Mac apps, earlier and in many ways better than AppleScript.
Then XML came along, and he integrated support for XML into the outliner and programming language, and used Frontier to build "Aretha", "Manila", and "Radio Userland".
He used Frontier to build a fully programmable blogging and podcasting platform, with a dynamic HTTP server, a static HTML generator, structured XML editing, RSS publication and syndication, XML-RPC client and server, OPML import and export, and much more.
Excerpts from the second (26217472):
I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh and I worked together for two different companies porting NeWS to the Mac.
The fact that Xanadu didn't have a built-in extension language was a disappointment, since extensibility was an essential ingredient to the success of Emacs, HyperCard, Director, and the World Wide Web.
Anyway, my take on all this hyper-crap is that it's useless without a good scripting language. I think that's why Emacs was so successful, why HyperCard was so important, what made NeWS so interesting, why HyperLook was so powerful, why Director has been so successful, how it's possible for you to read this discussion board served by Frontier, and what made the World Wide Web what it is today: they all had extension languages built into them.
If you're into malleable computing and you've never looked at outline-as-language systems (Frontier/UserTalk, MORE, later outliner-programming ideas), you're missing half the Mac story — the half that shipped before AppleScript stabilized.