Lack of scriptability in Unix desktops

Daniel Barlow:“As many people by now have the misfortune to know, one of my pet rants about Unix as a desktop OS is the lack of decent support for scripting applications. Some apps do CORBA, some apps listen on sockets, some apps reread their config file when sent certain signals, some apps you can start twice and the second instance will communicate its command line args to the first, and some apps (e.g. GNOME, KDE stuff) use some vast framework which handles it all in a
you-shouldn’t-care-about-the-internals way. None of them have seen pervasive uptake…” [Hack the Planet]