What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.
In the Beginning there Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson [Full essay]
I have been using PCs since the 80s. My first experience with Linux was in my early teens. I have loved the command line for a long time. There is something special about passing rapid commands to a computer and having it respond rapidly to your commands.
Several years ago in the midst of my frenzy of learning to write Ruby code, I started making command-line applications. At the same time I was also playing with screen scraping and RESTful APIs. This begat lyracyst, which begat oversetter, and things spiralled out of control from there.
Coinciding with my Ruby stint was a venture with some friends to possibly create a mobile phone video game using HTML5 technologies, which meant I had to learn Javascript.
The game project got put on the back burner but I stayed on my Javascript kick. You see, I had been hearing about Node.js for some time, and porting lyracyst and oversetter to Node.js seemed a good way to learn Javascript.
The end result is 3 separate utilities, two of which are based on previous Ruby projects.
- leximaven - for understanding and manipulating the English language,
- iloa - for searching repositories of knowledge, and
- toloko - for translating words.
They aim to follow the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well". My hope is that others have as much fun hacking language and knowledge as I do.