I am achieving what I initially set out to achieve, and with far less
code than yours, so have no intention
of changing anything.
I, also, am a lucky sort of chap insofar as I don't really mind that
much if my stack takes 3 days to work its way
through a corpus . . . I can go and do some teaching, read a book, cook
some food, go for a bike ride, talk to my wife,
play with my cats, and so on.
That has ALWAYS been my approach to programming for one simple reason:
working every holiday for very many years indeed on a farm
on an island I had to sort out broken bailers, tractors and so on.
Now "proper" spares had to come, on a ferry, at a vast transportation
overhead, from the mainland of Scotland. We could not afford
that, so we fossicked (lovely verb) for whatever would do the job in the
'graveyard' of broken tractors, cars, stuff we had picked up from the
local dump, and so on. Every single time we got our accursed bailer to
bail the straw and the hay, we got the cotter pins we needed to
connect the tractor to the plough, harrow, muck-spreader or whatever;
never very elegant, but they worked. In fact my younger son was on that
farm just 8 days ago and was shown some of my repair work by the
farmer's son (the farmer is long dead); still functional after 25 years.
I have, just, worked out a way to colourise the items I want, and while,
churning through some socking great corpus that would take days, I only
need it to colourise the sentences the previous routine has extracted,
so that won't take that long.
You, if it really seems such a good idea (and is it?) are more than
welcome to download my stack
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ja47l87gg87sn0q/AAAIj99kEQVOb8ev3jz8C5ORa?dl=0
File:
TA.zip
and mess around with the script to your heart's content.
AND, while we are talking about time-consuming exercises: having put 4
hours of work into the thing, that seems, already, a bit more than the
thing deserves as I am not interested in winning the Tour de France,
simply extracting some data from a million word corpus with absolutely
no deadline at all unless I choose to impose one. The results MAY get
rolled into a paper my wife and I are THINKING of writing for an
academic conference . . . .
Almost ALL the stacks I have thrown out into the public domain in the
last 6 months have come back to me with comments about how my code is
clunky, inefficient, and so forth; and I would not doubt for a minute
that that is probably true.
HOWEVER, as far as I am concerned there is one enormous advantage about
my code above thine, or anybody else's; while thy code and the code of
many others is probably more efficient, more clever and gets things done
more quickly, I don't understand the finer points of it, while I
understand how my code works 100% because it was written by me, follows
my logic, and does what I require it to do.
It is always entertaining and instructive to see how people react to my
code, and I often learn a lot from their reactions (not least about
human psychology), including new coding tricks - but there always come a
point where the burden of having to plough through other
people's code (reflecting the way their minds work) feels like too much
in comparison from anything I might learn from it.
-----------------------------------
I also suspect that very many people share my interest in getting "the
job done" rather than producing posh code.
RunRev claim, on their website, that one can learn to code quickly. With
Livecode one can learn how to code RELATIVELY quickly, up
to a certain point; and many people who are not programmers qua
programmers should be attracted by that because they have probably
got other things to do other than JUST program.
I am, at least to a certain extent, one of those people, as computer
programming is not the hinge on which my life rotates (and this became
extremely clear just recently when I spent 3 weeks driving round Europe
without access to any programming facilities at all), and that is
why I may come across as a bit "rude and crude" to other programmers:
mainly because I have evry little patience with reducing 25 lines
of code to 10 if it will take 12 hours to do that.
The cow has a breach-presentation calf inside it which will kill her and
the calf within half an hour, to hell with calling the vet,
I'm going to get my right arm up inside her and manipulate the calf so
that it is facing head forwards:
whether I do that the way posh younger sons of the aristocracy learn how
to with their rubber gloves off at agricultural school
or not I just don't care: I am trying to save 2 lives, however I do it.
------------------------------------
I apologise if that comes across as a rant (well . . . it IS a rant),
but it is something that I feel quite strongly about, and fell needs to
be said
as a necessary corrective, from time to time.
-----------------------------------
One of the things I DO LOVE about LiveCode is that there is room for
"Farmer Richmond" as well as all the "Real Coders", and I do
think that that is something that Runtime Revolution would do well to
tak more tent of in their advertising.
Richmond.
