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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)

#91

Post by dhosek »

mandeepj wrote: post #85
Aurornis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few engineers could build a good spell checker without external libraries, giving a database of valid words. Writing a spell checker that quickly identifies if a word is in a list of valid words (the problem described in the article) is a trivial problem for anyone who has basic algorithms and data structure knowledge. It's the classic example for using a trie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie The problem describ…

> How do you store your list of 200K words on a system with only 256K of memory? Your hard disk is almost always larger than your RAM. You only load into memory what's needed at the moment. I hope that gives a hint on how to proceed with the above problem.

But you don’t necessarily even have a hard disk. You might only have a 320K floppy. Floppy-only computers were pretty common in the late 80s when I was in undergrad.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#92

Post by numpad0 »

grishka wrote: post #63
numpad0 wrote: post #46

It's also a key enabler to CJK typing on computers. CJK scripts never map to keyboards well, so instead of actually typing, approximate representations are typed in and regularized into written forms using similar technologies as spell checkers. It's a neat thing if you speak one of the languages, sort of interesting that a similar tool haven't been integrated into English keyboards.

Doesn't Chinese input usually work by typing Latin codes for characters? Korean characters represent syllables made up of shapes representing individual sounds, those fit on a keyboard just fine. And I'm not sure about Japanese, there they may use something like spell checkers to map kana to kanji. Another interesting challenge with CJK languages was just displaying them. You need higher-resolution graphics and a muc…

IIUC there are ambiguity problems in Chinese and Korean, just less than there are for Japanese. Korean input has no end-of-character marks and multi-character entry could be split different ways, Chinese has bunch of homonyms-in-Latin, and Japanese is a huge mess(like always, if I think about it...)

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#93

Post by doubled112 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75
zimpenfish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar One of the most aggravating things in iOS. Trips me up almost every day (and it's been there for what? 10 years now?)

Wait until you realize that the icon of the period and spacebar don't at all line up to the touch area due to touch gravitation. You can tap slightly more on the spacebar side and still end up with a period. https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1ekszul/comment/lgn... So if you suffer from this it's not even your fault. You're literally hitting the spacebar but some incentive at Apple in their org structure has le…

All this time (literal years) I thought I.was.losing it.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#94

Post by paradox460 »

IshKebab wrote: post #49
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".

Not just that, but the strong leader needs to ensure that it can be fixed.

Yelling at a rank-and-file to unfuck some random system, then not giving them any time, resources, or tools to fix it is just being a dictatorial dickhead.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#95

Post by paradox460 »

nicce wrote: post #24
keiferski wrote: post #19

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found." Does anyone else have this exper…

Bit off-topic - macOS has excellent built-in dictionary. Just select the word in any app, press Ctrl+Command+D and it opens it. It even guesses most incorrect words correctly. Also translation available if it exist for current keyboard locales. E.g. > No entries for "typoglycemia", did you mean "hypoglycemia"?

Alfred ties into it nicely too, you can type `spell someword` and the completions below have the various spellings of words, fuzzy matched. Select one and the word goes onto your clipboard

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#96

Post by paradox460 »

torium wrote: post #31
jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling…

I remember hearing this as late as the early 00s. I'd buy electronic dictionaries and spell checkers at yard sales and things like that, and use them in class. Multiple teachers were disapproving of it, despite it basically just being a paper book dictionary in a small, TI-92 shaped device. 10 year old me never saw how flipping through some obnoxiously heavy book in the back of the classroom was better than just punching in a few letters, hitting the "show definition", and ensuring I was spelling and using "curmudgeonly" properly.

Same went for using MacWord vs AppleWorks. MacWord had a built in dictionary, AppleWorks didn't.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#97

Post by paradox460 »

grishka wrote: post #63
numpad0 wrote: post #46

It's also a key enabler to CJK typing on computers. CJK scripts never map to keyboards well, so instead of actually typing, approximate representations are typed in and regularized into written forms using similar technologies as spell checkers. It's a neat thing if you speak one of the languages, sort of interesting that a similar tool haven't been integrated into English keyboards.

Doesn't Chinese input usually work by typing Latin codes for characters? Korean characters represent syllables made up of shapes representing individual sounds, those fit on a keyboard just fine. And I'm not sure about Japanese, there they may use something like spell checkers to map kana to kanji. Another interesting challenge with CJK languages was just displaying them. You need higher-resolution graphics and a muc…

Romanization systems for Chinese vary, but all have the issue that a single "word" in the romanized system can map to dozens, if not hundreds, of actual "words" in the target language.

Pinyin is sort of the standard for romanization, although other systems exist, as well as inputs that aren't based on romanization (bopomofo).

Take the pinyin `fei`. Just looking at the tones that can be on this word, it can mean at least 4 words (my dictionary app couldn't find any neutral tone words). In reality, its at least dozens, each with different contextual meanings.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#99

Post by unregistereddev »

dhosek wrote: post #91
mandeepj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you store your list of 200K words on a system with only 256K of memory? Your hard disk is almost always larger than your RAM. You only load into memory what's needed at the moment. I hope that gives a hint on how to proceed with the above problem.

But you don’t necessarily even have a hard disk. You might only have a 320K floppy. Floppy-only computers were pretty common in the late 80s when I was in undergrad.

Indeed, I remember having to insert a dedicated 5 1/4" floppy in order to run spell check in Apple Writer on an Apple ][e.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#100

Post by SkyPuncher »

ww520 wrote: post #71
IshKebab wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".

Or the incentive aligned.

This is really what it is.
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