HyperTalk was brilliant because everything seemed to just naturally work. The grammar and object model were both highly intuitive – you really could just guess the right syntax.

AppleScript and HyperTalk are aesthetically very similar but every time I have to write something in AppleScript I get oddball parse errors that I can never decipher and I need to randomly try things until an approach succeeds (for reasons I don't understand) or I give up.

Where HyperTalk was friendly and forgiving, AppleTalk is punishing.

I loved HyperTalk, but my experience with it was that:

A. Almost any English sentence was grammatically valid.

B. Almost none of those sentences did what you expected.

I find AppleScript a more regular language overall. I think the biggest difference is that HyperTalk was built in to the HyperCard environment, and therefore most of the “language” was in fact just HyperCard-supplied functionality, whereas AppleScript has very little built-in functionality, and sometimes this surprises people when they discover that it’s up to some other application to decide what the behavior of the script is.