Jane Austen's peculiarity

[hh]

Richmond, this was your last post to this thread before mine.

> My current version is here:
> https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ja47l87gg87sn0q/AAAIj99kEQVOb8ev3jz8C5ORa?dl=0
> 
> File : TA.zip
> play with it, rip it to pieces, improve it: go on, I dare you :)
> 
> Richmond.

So I downloaded this stack and wrote a script that implemented three ideas,
two by other LCoders, one by me. Because you graciously ignored these ideas,
I was simply curious about their effects on speed and selectivity (by using
trueWords). I didn't play with your stack, I didn't rip it into pieces, but
somehow improved it a bit in the sense of using effectively some available
features of LC 7.

It was no dare, I had fun. And you had obviously fun too, what a great
speech! Who dares wins, you --- and me.

Hermann

p.s. Shouldn't the opening of your speech read "I was _achieved_"? ;-)

Richmond wrote:

> I am achieving what I initially set out to achieve, and with far less 
> code than yours, so have no intention
> of changing anything.
> 
> I, also, am a lucky sort of chap insofar as I don't really mind that 
> much if my stack takes 3 days to work its way
> through a corpus . . . I can go and do some teaching, read a book, cook 
> some food, go for a bike ride, talk to my wife,
> play with my cats, and so on.
> 
> That has ALWAYS been my approach to programming for one simple reason: 
> working every holiday for very many years indeed on a farm
> on an island I had to sort out broken bailers, tractors and so on.
> 
> Now "proper" spares had to come, on a ferry, at a vast transportation 
> overhead, from the mainland of Scotland. We could not afford
> that, so we fossicked (lovely verb) for whatever would do the job in the 
> 'graveyard' of broken tractors, cars, stuff we had picked up from the
> local dump, and so on. Every single time we got our accursed bailer to 
> bail the straw and the hay, we got the cotter pins we needed to
> connect the tractor to the plough, harrow, muck-spreader or whatever; 
> never very elegant, but they worked. In fact my younger son was on that 
> farm just 8 days ago and was shown some of my repair work by the 
> farmer's son (the farmer is long dead); still functional after 25 years.
> 
> I have, just, worked out a way to colourise the items I want, and while, 
> churning through some socking great corpus that would take days, I only 
> need it to colourise the sentences the previous routine has extracted, 
> so that won't take that long.
> 
> You, if it really seems such a good idea (and is it?) are more than 
> welcome to download my stack
> 
> 
> https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ja47l87gg87sn0q/AAAIj99kEQVOb8ev3jz8C5ORa?dl=0
>  File: 
> TA.zip
> 
> and mess around with the script to your heart's content.
> 
> AND, while we are talking about time-consuming exercises: having put 4 
> hours of work into the thing, that seems, already, a bit more than the
> thing deserves as I am not interested in winning the Tour de France, 
> simply extracting some data from a million word corpus with absolutely 
> no deadline at all unless I choose to impose one. The results MAY get 
> rolled into a paper my wife and I are THINKING of writing for an
> academic conference . . . .
> 
> Almost ALL the stacks I have thrown out into the public domain in the 
> last 6 months have come back to me with comments about how my code is 
> clunky, inefficient, and so forth; and I would not doubt for a minute 
> that that is probably true.
> 
> HOWEVER, as far as I am concerned there is one enormous advantage about 
> my code above thine, or anybody else's; while thy code and the code of 
> many others is probably more efficient, more clever and gets things done 
> more quickly, I don't understand the finer points of it, while I 
> understand how my code works 100% because it was written by me, follows 
> my logic, and does what I require it to do.
> 
> It is always entertaining and instructive to see how people react to my 
> code, and I often learn a lot from their reactions (not least about
> human psychology), including new coding tricks - but there always come a 
> point where the burden of having to plough through other
> people's code (reflecting the way their minds work) feels like too much 
> in comparison from anything I might learn from it.
> 
> -----------------------------------
> 
> I also suspect that very many people share my interest in getting "the 
> job done" rather than producing posh code.
> 
> RunRev claim, on their website, that one can learn to code quickly. With 
> Livecode one can learn how to code RELATIVELY quickly, up
> to a certain point; and many people  who are not programmers qua 
> programmers should be attracted by that because they have probably
> got other things to do other than JUST program.
> 
> I am, at least to a certain extent, one of those people, as computer 
> programming is not the hinge on which my life rotates (and this became
> extremely clear just recently when I spent 3 weeks driving round Europe 
> without access to any programming facilities at all), and that is
> why I may come across as a bit "rude and crude" to other programmers: 
> mainly because I have evry little patience with reducing 25 lines
> of code to 10 if it will take 12 hours to do that.
> 
> The cow has a breach-presentation calf inside it which will kill her and 
> the calf within half an hour, to hell with calling the vet,
> I'm going to get my right arm up inside her and manipulate the calf so 
> that it is facing head forwards:
> whether I do that the way posh younger sons of the aristocracy learn how 
> to with their rubber gloves off at agricultural school
> or not I just don't care: I am trying to save 2 lives, however I do it.
> 
> ------------------------------------
> 
> I apologise if that comes across as a rant (well . . . it IS a rant), 
> but it is something that I feel quite strongly about, and fell needs to 
> be said
> as a necessary corrective, from time to time.
> 
> -----------------------------------
> 
> One of the things I DO LOVE about LiveCode is that there is room for 
> "Farmer Richmond" as well as all the "Real Coders", and I do
> think that that is something that Runtime Revolution would do well to 
> tak more tent of in their advertising.
> 
> Richmond.
> 
>