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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)

#111

Post by Gibbon1 »

kccqzy wrote: post #42
DevX101 wrote: post #13

It still is? Few engineers could build a good spell checker without external libraries, giving a database of valid words.

I was actually asked to build a spell checker in an interview. I immediately thought of Peter Norvig's article on spell corrector ( https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html ) and proceeded to explain. It turned out that the interviewer really wanted a spell checker not spell corrector : the program will only point out words not in the set of known words. I failed that interview by overengineering.

Marvin the Paranoid Android voice. 'Oh... that. Just do a linear search on a dictionary. Put the small words first. I know it's woefully inefficient but you won't fuck that up'

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

#112

Post by stripe_away »

ttoinou wrote: post #107
abullinan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.

Surely there must be some counter examples. Collison brothers at Stripe ?

I guess you never worked at Stripe.

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

#113

Post by kelipso »

doubled112 wrote: post #93
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol, the amount of time I spent backspacing to retype without the period. Probably my main annoyance in ios.

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

#115

Post by IshKebab »

abullinan wrote: post #80
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".

It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.

I don't think it requires being an arsehole. Just being firm. That doesn't require arseholery.

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

#116

Post by valiant55 »

mathiaspoint wrote: post #79
gitpusher wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone…

Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.

I was just thinking about Linux/Linus the other day. How will Linux fair when Linus is no longer with us?

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

#117

Post by canucker2016 »

ksherlock wrote: post #98
AlphaAndOmega0 wrote: post #4

I'd have liked more explanation of the actual solutions that programmers used at the time.

https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-6... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42752604

The first article I read about the techniques used in the spell program was the 1985 May issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM for those who know), https://dl.acm.org/toc/cacm/1985/28/5, in Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls column.

Not as much detail as the blog.codingconfessions.com article mentioned above, maybe some of the other/later techniques were added later on?

Link to the online version of the 1985 May Programming Pearls column: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532.315102

The PDF version of that article: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3532.315102

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

#119

Post by jdsnape »

valiant55 wrote: post #116
mathiaspoint wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.

I was just thinking about Linux/Linus the other day. How will Linux fair when Linus is no longer with us?

Fare, not fair

(I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter but I couldn’t help it in a discussion on quality)

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

#120

Post by anuramat »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #27
yndoendo wrote: post #18

It is 2025 and the best spell checker is a search engine. Numerous time an application will not provide the correct word. Only solution is to try the word in a search engine and try using in a sentence if that fails. In my opinion, this is where ML/AL local model, no internet required, would be the most beneficial today. Even had to use a search engine with, "thoughts and opi" because I forgot how to spell opinion be…

I've had a related idea for a while now. Instead of how LLMs operate by taking the current text and taking the most likely next token, you take your full text and use an LLM to find the likeliness/rank of each token. I'd imagine this creates a heatmap that shows which parts are the most 'surprising'. You wouldn't catch all misspelling, but it could be very useful information to find what flows and what doesn't - or p…

That's how BERT is trained, masked language modeling
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