love to see a youtube video that references a script that's…

it does still work, but that's because it's only been 2 years.

also, wow, this is horrible.

the script is to generate random kanji/han characters and insert them into minecraft books.
but the video references there being two hotkeys to generate two distinct books, which seemed odd. so I thought I'd check.

it turns out by "random" they mean "pre-randomized and is hardcoded into the 45 kilobyte autohotkey scripot"

I mean, I get it. I don't want to write AutoHotKey scripts either. it's a horrible, horrible language.

BUT STILL

it's like PHP designed by someone who learned on Visual Basic for Applications

ANYWAY I decided to not just complain about it, and archived it:
https://t.co/IKxjNQMZMK

that's the script for this video:
https://t.co/GPvTp17RDR

naturally I would comment and add a link to it, but of course I can't post links in the comments.

anyway, autohotkey is great.
have you ever wanted to get a list of drives on a system?
That's simple!

DriveGet, drives, List

now you have a variable named "drives" which is a string containing a list like "ACDEFP"

that's how programming languages work, right?

assigning variables
small brain: a=1 (fortran, C, descendants of C)
big brain: a := 1 (ALGOL, Pascal)
cosmic brain: LET A=1 (early BASIC)
multiverse brain: a <- 1 (F#, OCaml)
brane cosmology bulk brain: there is no assignment, functions output to one of their arguments (AHK)

fun fact: AHK actually also uses = and :=

it just doesn't use them for functions.

it's got "=" which is called legacy... assignment? they don't actually call it assignment.
legacy variable storage, let's say.

the fun thing is that = only takes integers, unquoted strings, and other variables.
so:

a=1
b=FOOBAR
c=%b%

but if you do:
a=1+2

that's either an error, or you'll get a string containing "1+2".
I'm not sure which. I don't really want to find out

whereas if you do:
a := 1+2

a will be set to "3"

BTW these differences in = and := mean that if you convert that above example from = to :=, you get:

a=1
b="FOOBAR"
c=b

in computer science, we call this "consistency"

this is the fundamental problem with AutoHotKey as a language:
it started as a bad batch scripting language and got a little powerful with some visual basic ideas, and then it got "fixed" into being a more usable language, but THEY LEFT THE OLD SYNTAX VALID FOR COMPATIBILITY

it's like having a language that uses Go's syntax but you can always just drop down to
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
in the middle of a method

autohotkey is a language that could have been fixed, and they tried to fix it, but they tried to fix it by nailing the "fixed" version onto the side of the broken version

I guess it's fortunate then that microsoft is trying so hard to murder autohotkey.
once it stops working there won't be any more language evolution

maybe I should port autohotkey to an arduino keyboard+mouse.

or maybe I shouldn't torture tiny computers