CLI in Ruby, ok.
Betty – English-like interface for the command line
81–84 of 84 posts
Re: Betty – English-like interface for the command line
#82Every natural language interface eventually will be required to generate a new program. For example, if you say my parser supports query like "count number of words in file X", someone would want to issue a queries like "count number of words starting with character a and at most length 3 in file X" and so on. Natural language interfaces eventually fall on its face not because parsing is really hard but rather becaus…
This may be why concerning of testing in ruby, dhh supports native Test::Unit instead of Cucumber [1].
Re: Betty – English-like interface for the command line
#83Crazier alternative: 1) Install howdoi https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi 2) Write commands like the following (all work as expected): howdoi get time in bash | sh howdoi clear bash | sh howdoi find current user bash | sh howdoi restart computer bash | sh howdoi fork bomb | sh #YOLO
Add this to your .bashrc:
function yolo() { howdoi ”$@“ bash | sh ;} $ yolo get time
1399402426
Re: Betty – English-like interface for the command line
#84Really interesting program, although, as Andrew has said, seems kinda limited. That's not your fault at all; any early project will seem limited in scope. Given some popularity and extra effort, something like this could be the Siri of the command line. Which gets me thinking -- is stuff like Siri and Google Now really just like this? Core set of pre-set commands surrounded by regex magic to recognize said pre-set co…
I think having a prefix (be that "betty" "b" and/or some "mode" for your shell) that signals you want to use natural language (with all it's ambiguity) is a good idea. The zsh way of suggesting "did you mean" rather than simply erroring with "command not found/invalid syntax" drives me nuts -- but a lot of people seem like it. Having a prefix allows you more freedom at "learning" -- ambiguity isn't so terrible if the…
Stuff like "next song", "accept call", etc. can be done with extensive knowledge in machine learning and some clever work.
The really tough bits will be stuff like,
"Siri, check if PBS Idea Channel has uploaded any new videos, please."
How will Siri know you mean the YouTube app? How will Siri know what "check if X has uploaded any new videos" means? How will Siri know you mean "PBS Idea Channel" and not the channel called "PBS Idea"?