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Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

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Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#241

Post by dvirsky »

the_af wrote: post #234
nigma1337 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all the same as in counter strike, as if one person was walking through walls, it'd break it for everyone else not walking through walls. My wordle doesn't get worse from you cheating, but my game of CS sure would.

Replace Counter Strike with a single player FPS then. "I don't need to implement wall blocking, the player should just refrain from walking through walls". It's not elegant, it's lazy.

But the equivalent analogy to Wordle in this case would be not implementing the letter check or not hiding the correct answer until you figure it out. That mechanism exists.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#242

Post by the_af »

zild3d wrote: post #236
the_af wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.

> an inelegant compromise ... It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation What would you change specifically? Adding an API call backed by servers / lambdas? The creator mentioned it costs in the tens of dollars per month to run wordle for 10s of millions of daily players. Having to run servers would not only add a ton of cost, but now be vulnerable to latency spikes, ddos, downtime. Wordle scaled…

Well yes, an API call or an encrypted/hashed DB of words so at least it's not casually accessible.

I understand that the costs might be an issue, but this doesn't make the solution "elegant". This is the kind of code I wrote as an 8-year old in BASIC, like I mentioned elsewhere, and even my young self understood back then it wasn't a satisfying solution, I just didn't know how to hide secret literals.

I mean, I enjoy Wordle as much as the next person, but let's not make it into some engineering achievement when it's clearly not one.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#243

Post by ghaff »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #87
ghaff wrote: post #17

I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things. 1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary…

On #1 - humph was hard for me, I've never encountered it in my reading (maybe I'm not reading a particular genre that uses it? Is it something Jane Austen used?), only got it via a a last ditch guess, because I'm familiar with "harrumph" and I had "-umph" already and "h" was the only prefix that remotely made any kind of sense.

Now that I've looked it up I'm "Oh sure." I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought of it as a dictionary word or something you would write outside of dialog however.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#244

Post by zild3d »

the_af wrote: post #242
zild3d wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an inelegant compromise ... It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation What would you change specifically? Adding an API call backed by servers / lambdas? The creator mentioned it costs in the tens of dollars per month to run wordle for 10s of millions of daily players. Having to run servers would not only add a ton of cost, but now be vulnerable to latency spikes, ddos, downtime. Wordle scaled…

Well yes, an API call or an encrypted/hashed DB of words so at least it's not casually accessible. I understand that the costs might be an issue, but this doesn't make the solution "elegant". This is the kind of code I wrote as an 8-year old in BASIC, like I mentioned elsewhere, and even my young self understood back then it wasn't a satisfying solution, I just didn't know how to hide secret literals. I mean, I enjoy…

> so at least it's not casually accessible

I'd argue that it's not. Puzzles in the newspapers also don't hide secrets, the answers are on the next page or upside down. And for wordle, the vast majority of players don't even know the solutions can be found in the source (because they don't know what that means), and most of the ones who do know that don't look anyway because otherwise what's the point of playing.

Having the solutions viewable client side may not be engineering elegance, but in this case I do think it is product elegance.

Adding the DB or servers you mentioned would mean costs continue to increase with # of users, which would then create pressure to figure out how to make money off of wordle. Then comes logins, ads, or at the very least donation requests

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#245

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

yen223 wrote: post #57
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work. I hope it inspires future devs to let go of feeling like they absolutely need to beg or require users to create accounts to capture email addresses just so they have a chance at monetizing their thing. Wordle may not have ever caught on if it were preemptively over-engineered:…

I wish I were smart enough to coin a catchy phrase that means "the moment some software dropped in quality, when they decided to add user accounts", because I see this quite a lot. I'm looking at you, Postman!

Yes, I left Postman immediately after rework because I couldn't understand how the hell to use it anymore.

Same with Docker Desktop. I tried to use it for personal use a few weeks ago and couldn't figure out how to docker build a container anymore on WSL, then tried on native Windows and it was jabbering on about HyperV prereq and I just uninstalled it and went back to WSL for traditional package management.

I think Docker shot themselves in the foot.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#246

Post by the_af »

zild3d wrote: post #244
the_af wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, an API call or an encrypted/hashed DB of words so at least it's not casually accessible. I understand that the costs might be an issue, but this doesn't make the solution "elegant". This is the kind of code I wrote as an 8-year old in BASIC, like I mentioned elsewhere, and even my young self understood back then it wasn't a satisfying solution, I just didn't know how to hide secret literals. I mean, I enjoy…

> so at least it's not casually accessible I'd argue that it's not. Puzzles in the newspapers also don't hide secrets, the answers are on the next page or upside down. And for wordle, the vast majority of players don't even know the solutions can be found in the source (because they don't know what that means), and most of the ones who do know that don't look anyway because otherwise what's the point of playing. Havi…

> which would then create pressure to figure out how to make money off of wordle

Oh, you got me there! Definitely wouldn't want that to happen.

You make good points. It's true the solution to newspaper crosswords is usually on the same page, upside down.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#247

Post by mmcnl »

com2kid wrote: post #238
yen223 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how Wordle managed to scale to 3 million players without Kubernetes, it must be magic.

When people ask me why I like SPAs: Because web servers are really good at serving up static files. That is it. I get to make an app, deliver it through the web, and not worry about server resources. I do have to worry about making the app not suck, but as a software engineer I should always be worrying about that! Web, mobile, desktop, making code not a bloated mess is kind of important no matter where it is running…

You're dumping all the compute requirements onto the client. But that's not always a bad thing. When done good, it's pretty good. Prime example: Worldle. No need to hate frontend.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#248

Post by mmcnl »

the_af wrote: post #200
dvirsky wrote: post #19

The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…

I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.

Every design decision is a compromise. "Inelegant" is simply another word for "I would've done in it a different way".

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#249

Post by mmcnl »

the_af wrote: post #242
zild3d wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an inelegant compromise ... It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation What would you change specifically? Adding an API call backed by servers / lambdas? The creator mentioned it costs in the tens of dollars per month to run wordle for 10s of millions of daily players. Having to run servers would not only add a ton of cost, but now be vulnerable to latency spikes, ddos, downtime. Wordle scaled…

Well yes, an API call or an encrypted/hashed DB of words so at least it's not casually accessible. I understand that the costs might be an issue, but this doesn't make the solution "elegant". This is the kind of code I wrote as an 8-year old in BASIC, like I mentioned elsewhere, and even my young self understood back then it wasn't a satisfying solution, I just didn't know how to hide secret literals. I mean, I enjoy…

What's the problem with making the words accessible? It's not a secret. It is most definitely an engineering achievement. The author actually had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve and he achieved that goal in a very minimal and scalable way. Engineering achievements don't have to be innovative complex codebases.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#250

Post by ViViDboarder »

heyheyhey wrote: post #101
jasonpeacock wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is why it's so successful. It's just challenging enough to make you think, but still solvable by most people. So we all get that nice dopamine rush of solving a puzzle with a reasonable perceived effort. How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption. To me, that's the genius…

> How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? The NYT Crossword Minis is actually really popular within my friend group. It's usually about 8-10 words.

Actually, it’s 5x5 (typically). So five letter words again, just like Wordle. Again, likely not a coincidence.
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