mcglk

I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to what language Affinity should select for scripting.
That said, I'd rather strongly prefer them to select a fully non-proprietary language.
Swift is deeply tied to Apple's ecosystem, and Apple drives that standard. I'd be just as opposed to TypeScript, for the same reasons—they may pretend to be open-source, but they're subject to the whims of those proprietors, and their priorities are always going to favor what's good for the corporation over what's good for the community.
After all, many of us really liked AppleScript, and what happened to that?

I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to what language Affinity should select for scripting.
That said, I'd rather strongly prefer them to select a fully non-proprietary language.
Swift is deeply tied to Apple's ecosystem, and Apple drives that standard. I'd be just as opposed to TypeScript, for the same reasons—they may pretend to be open-source, but they're subject to the whims of those proprietors, and their priorities are always going to favor what's good for the corporation over what's good for the community.
After all, many of us really liked AppleScript, and what happened to that?

I do empathize greatly. I've been investing some time in workarounds. One of my InDesign scripts, for example, was a barcode generator. Instead, I'm converting it to a shell script to generate an SVG image, and then I'll just place the image into a Publisher document . . . but it's definitely a substandard workaround. Not having scripting really makes it hard to shift entirely away from InDesign. But I'm also really tired of the increasing random Adobe is demanding just to have access to my documents. (Similarly, not supporting right-to-left text is a major bummer, since one of my projects involves Semitic languages.) I like that it does 90% of my work-a-day stuff, but that last 10% is presently pretty painful.

Wouldn't it be nice if the good folks at Serif would lift a tip of the veil so we know what to expect?
Can we, indesign users, still use applescript/javascript in the future with AP or had we better started learning Python or whatever other option?

I would really love to see new tools, like the one in Illustrator- blend, shape creator, many different distortion tools like width tool, bloat tool and etc.

Why it looks ugly? Because it's not your language of preference? Because it has brackets to open and close blocks instead of tabs?

I've seen a few people preaching about ancient languages in here, trying to make it relevant. One preaching about Haskell, others about Lua or Cobol, don't know, and so on.

So your opinions are biased, favoring personal preference and not a generalized overview on users needs and simplicity, accessibility, maintainability, compatibility, etc.

Top programming language of 2019
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The whole indentation-as-syntax thing Python has going on reminds me of FORTRAN 77 in which you would make a comment by putting the letter "C" in column 1, columns 2-5 were for labels, etc...
I know there are those who love it, but to go back to that now that we have moved on from punched cards feels programmer-hostile to me and kind of turned me off to that language.

Being able to automate InDesign was one of the main reasons I gravitated to it for so long; I was able to write scripts that would generate barcodes on the fly, populate label sheets from a database with full control over placement, all sorts of things. That said, Adobe's AppleScript support has always been half-hearted, and now Apple seems to be putting AppleScript in the let-it-die department. It's extremely disappointing.
So while full AppleScript support would be nice, it might be considerably wiser if there were an independent scripting engine for Affinity Publisher (and Designer and Photo, to be honest). But it'd have to be able to take input from the Unix world (I routinely generate AppleScripts from Python or Perl and use `osascript` to run them, for example; I'd need a similar process for Affinity applications).

@Gabe Logan
Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums
It's not possible yet. There are plans to be able to open IDML files in the future
<mod edit> IDML not INDD file clarification was made in an edit on 6th July 2019 </mod edit>

Thank you!