Jane Austen's peculiarity

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Tue Aug 11 04:11:20 EDT 2015


On 10/08/15 23:51, hh wrote:
> 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.

I am most gratified to find that someone actually read and enjoyed one 
of my rants.

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

Well it SHOULD (perhaps) read "I have achieved", but at the point
I wrote that I had not put the colourisation scripts into the relevant 
buttons,
so the action had not been completed :)

It could not read "I was achieved" in the way Jane Austen was using that 
sort of structure because 'achieve'
is a TRANSITIVE verb.

>
> 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.
>>
>>
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