[giantrobot]

Not the GP but a lot of application level scriptability came from AppleScript/Apple Events which was a MacOS thing and not from NeXT. There was a ton of work that went into adding Apple Events support into AppKit (it was already baked into Carbon) which gave Cocoa applications a level of "free" scriptability. Same with UI scripting. Just adding AppleScript names, I forget the exact terminology now, to a UI control made it accessible via AppleScript.

That never existed in iOS and as UIKit was merged into macOS that old support was never added back in. AFAIK the Shortcuts system uses a totally different automation mechanism for scripting applications.

For a lot of applications, especially ones that started life in the classic MacOS days, AppleScript automation was pretty amazing. You could easily tie very disparate applications together.

The application level automation was orthogonal to the use of Objective-C or even Cocoa.

Source: I was at Apple from 2004-2020 and did a lot with automation over the years while there.