rwg 0.1.1 released

rwg 0.1.1 is released, with these improvements:

• interactive mode
• null option
• improved error messages

Releasing a new version every few days is cool!

The link is here.

I intend to work on compilation next.

rwg 0.1.0 released

I'm happy to announce the release of rwg 0.1.0, a random word generator for conlangers.

You can download it here, or read the (short) manual here.

On my todo list:

• better error messages
• interactive UI
• improved disallow directive
• optional choices
• rulefile compilation

Happy conlanging!

Type safety + auto = win!

A while back, playing around with functional programming, I started trying to implement interesting functions in Lisp. It all went well until permute, a function which isn't that complicated but involves lists, lists of lists, and lists of lists of lists. This was so confusing and complicated that I gave up.

More recently, I tried it again in Haskell. It took less than twenty minutes! The reason was Haskell's type declarations, which made it so much easier to think about what was going in and out.

The type system can often get annoying, and become a pain (e.g. Java), hence the popularity of dynamic typing (Python/Ruby/Ecmascript). But when thinking about complicated algorithms and systems, they are a great structuring force. Which is part of why I love D: "auto" and "Variant" lets you forget about a lot of it, but you can still be explicit when it is important.

gloss2lang

Check out this new software: gloss2lang. It merely translates interlinear glosses into specific languages. You have to create a G2LF file.

English-to-Latin-to-English-to-Latin-and-so-on

This shows you how bad even the best computer translators are.

Taking the Babel text, I translated it into Latin, back to English, back to Latin, and so on. But as that would just eventually put out gibberish, every time it was in English, I tried to make sense of the translation. Here's my favorite:

The whole world had only one voice, and they used the same words for the same things. A certain people found a plain in the in the east, the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.

And they said to eachother: "Come, let us make brick, and bake with fire." And they had brick for stone, and slime for mortar. Then they heard a voice: "Come, let us make ourselves a city, so that we may make ourselves a name, and everyone else will be scattered across the face of the earth." It came from a tower in heaven.

The people spoke with the same voice, like one man uses the same tongue. The voice began to be seen. Put no trust in it. Then the people said: "Come, let us go down, and there confound the language so every man's voice will be unique.

The people stopped building the city. They no longer trusted Babel, because he had caused them to scatter everyone across the face of the earth.

By chance, the Lord saw the tower, and he finished building the city of the people. That place is all places all over the world.

This is kind of confusing, so here is a "retelling:"

Long ago, when everyone spoke the same language, a certain people lived in an eastern plain called Shinar. They were technologically advanced, and could make bricks and fire.

One day, they heard a voice that came from a tower in heaven: "make a city for yourself! Make yourself famous! Everyone will scatter away from you." They obeyed it.

Eventually, the Shinarites began to understand that the voice was evil. They stopped building the city, and mended their ways by giving everyone in the world their own unique voice. They no longer trust Babel (the united tongue).

Later, when the Lord saw what had happened, he finished building the Shinarite city. That city is Earth.

 May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white!

Positum Intitulō

This post is of multiple subjects, which is why it has no title.

Subject 1
I made it my goal to post once a week. I will do so every Sunday.

Subject 2
Last post I said that I would tell you about the papers. They included:

• A photocopy of a family record, showing the ancestors of my grandfather in two generations, including the names and BMD dates of Cora's parents. For those that don't know, BMD stands for birth-marriage-death, and Cora's parents were until now a mystery.
• A discharge record of my great-grandfather Frank Brown
• A letter to ditto from his cousin
• A handwritten poem about Father Christmas by my great-great grandfather
• A ditto about a boy drowning by ditto.

This leads to more research I will do over the summer, when I get an ancestry.com account:

• Search for immigration papers of Cora's parents (they were Norwegian), and after that birth records.
• Find out about my great-grandfather's regiment
• Do more research on his ancestry

Who knows what I'll find -- that's the beauty of genealogy.

Subject 3

I said that I was doing Perl; now I'm learning C++. So far I've managed to do, hmm, 0 successful programs.

I'm working on it.

Efharistó!

VoteEasy

Most voters will act on who they think "looks trustworthy" or "sounds okay," not actually on their views. For example, there are practically twice as many people who identify themselves as conservative then as liberal, though the obviously not conservative Barack Obama won the election.

So that people know who they are voting for, they should go to http://votesmart.org/voteeasy/.

Just take a simple test on your political views, and it will match you to the candidates who agree with you most. It's wonderful if you have no idea who to vote for.