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Automatic Spelling Corrections On Github
An anonymous reader writes "Github projects may be seeing a different kind of contributor than normal: a small bot is now crawling through projects, contributing spelling corrections. It builds on top of the github API and existing documentation style-checking code. Future directions for the project look beyond spelling mistakes and at automated bug fixing on a large scale."
I wonder if this bot will do as well as every HR department out there posting "pearl" and "unique admin" positions
Eventually someone will contribute SW that will guess the contributors by their distinctive patterns of spelling mistakes. I hope it will be able to find them in the archives. I won't be surprised to read on Slashdot some copyright lawsuit that depends on both apps, perhaps on opposing sides of the claim.
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make install -not war
According to the article, it just submits a pull request. This isn't some bot running on Google's own servers making changes without permission. So if anyone has a problem with it, or if it submits poor changes, they can simply ignore it.
It's not like it can autocommit - the original project owner has to accept the patch.
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Don't worry, some bot will fix that.
Mostly random stuff.
Wikipedia has similar bots and has been using them for a long time. For example there's Bibcode Bot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bibcode_Bot which cleans up citations. That bot is smart enough that it can even extract bibliographic information from a linked website and put it into the citation. The bots used do occasionally go awry but by and large end up saving a lot of time. Of course, Wikipedia has the advantage that one isn't modifying code so if a bot screws up a page will just look a little wonky. They'll need to be careful with this. But it looks like for now it is restricted to readme files and requires approval of the changes by the user, which should help prevent things from going too drastically wrong.
Clbuttic overaction, in my opinion. This buttbuttination of our writing by computers is out of hand. I don't know if my consbreastution can take it...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Don't confuse what a spell checker does when auto-correcting with what something like T9 or smart phone predictive text does. The latter is the cause of the cell phone headaches.
While a spellchecker will check a string of characters against a dictionary and attempt to correct misspellings (like "misspell" with only 1 s or 1 l), predictive text auto-correct is both more clever and more stupid.
Predictive text makes certain assumptions about the keyboard arrangement and tries to fit typos to possible words that could have been intended had the user not been smashing 3 tiny buttons at once on a cell phone or screen keyboard. While a spellchecker would recognize "danm" as a typo for "damn" with just transposed letters, it would never try to correct it to "calm" on the basis that the letter c is close to the letter d and n and m are nearby or some nonsense as that.
A plain old spellchecker, like the one under discussion here, makes no attempt to guess what word was meant and assume a typo is a result of accidentally pressing keys near the intended ones. It just looks at what words could have been intended based on close matches with the dictionary.
By the way, auto-correct will frequently fail to guess a replacement when the misspelling involves letters that are not nearby on the keyboard.
Yeah, I did notice that (pull request), but I secretly love the idea of a braindead iphone type spell corrector running around automatically changing 'strcpy' to 'stripy', or 'unlk' to 'unlink'. And then thinking you can fix it with even more complex regexps.
Excuse me, it's "capisce".
In my experience, "freedom of language" almost always means "ignorance of language" and is akin to "keeping it real".
The handful of people whose grasp of language is so good that they can purposely misspell or use poor grammar for effect will almost certainly not be hindered by anything "github" does, unless this new spellchecker is going to be clumsily used on code and the hilarity that ensues breaks software that said linguistic maestro uses. See what I just did there? I purposely used clumsy sentence structure because I'm Just. That. Good.
Capisce?
You are welcome on my lawn.
More annoying would be if it runs around autocorrecting spelling of documents written in a language it doesn't understand. Or worse, if it tries to mangle everything into that hideous American patois by removing the letter "U" from words like "colour".