Mayhem is an interesting scripting tool which reduces programming to its simplest, and most accessible core: just give the program an event you'd like to monitor, and how it should react when that happens, and it'll take care of the rest. The program has plenty of useful built-in events. Some are local; you can tell Mayhem to react when a folder's contents are changed, when a key is pressed, a word is spoken or a given period of time has elapsed. But others allow you to watch outside events: Mayhem can check to see if an RSS Feed is updated, a stock price has changed, or even whether the temperature has changed.