A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
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Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#2(2008) Popular in:
2023 (314 points, 180 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34971924
2020 (363 points, 143 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296900
2012 (94+156 points, 70+61 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4640658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466388
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#3Fast forward to now, and autocorrect in draft Teams messages appears to be the unbreakable barrier.
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#4I'd have liked more explanation of the actual solutions that programmers used at the time.
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#5[flagged]
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#6I loved what Peter Norvig did with this. It's not just a spell checker, but a spelling corrector. https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#7Given that spellcheckers are mostly stable tech, I wonder why Google’s spellchecker in Gmail, or even in Chrome in “enhanced” mode, is so bad.
Even Microsoft Word, being a local app and everything, manages to work better than Google’s cloud-based offerings. That’s surely evidence that progress is far from being linear.
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#8Checking if a word is spelled correctly is easy. It is providing high-quality suggestions that is hard.
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#9A recent article from PCGamer adding some more details: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/implementing-a-spellchecker...
Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
#10[flagged]
After having used the IntelliJ/PyCharm spellchecker for German quite extensively I can only attest to this. It's so much more than just checking is a word is spelled correctly.
On the other hand, I did use Grammarly for a while and ultimately became annoyed at its tendency to keep "re-adjusting" sentences after it had already fixed them, so there is a fine line to walk.