Rant

Languages and libraries

procedural text generation language

SHOW HN2014

155points
36comments
#161of 2,272 in 2014
Top 8%of 2014 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

4 positive, 12 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 7 critical, out of 25 comments about the project. Thread score 0.00.

Idea: 3 for, 3 againstExecution: 0 for, 4 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Cool and fun to play with

    From 3 comments
    • This is really cool, I had been working on something similar. I do think it's a little 'pejorative' to try to computationally define creativity, though. Creativity seems to…
      drcomputer on HN
    • Very fun!
      chillzilla on HN
    • Very nice tool, thanks. Where can i find a documentation or a list of commands?
      dsplatonov on HN
  • Useful for generating test fixtures and data

    From 1 comment
    • One place I can see this really shining is as part of a script that generates fixtures for Django apps.
      kagia on HN

Objections

  • Unclear practical use cases beyond SEO spam

    From 3 comments
    • Maybe not bad, definitely has few very cool features (rhymes impressed me), but I'm struggling to imagine when I'd actually need to use it. Sometimes I do need some random…
      krick on HN
    • I'm seeing a lot of people in comments talking about how they wrote something similar or other tools exist. Can someone explain their use cases that don't involce SEO or some…
      azinman2 on HN
    • Very cool. I just wish I wasn't so certain that the developers of spamming tools will rip this off with shrieks of glee and use it to stuff our inboxes with yet more junk.
      cstross on HN
  • Docs for new users could be clearer

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool! I attempted a very primitive version of this for generating band names[1]. Now I'm tempted to port it to Rant :) One bit of advice though - the "getting started"…
      dandelany on HN

Requests

  • Clearer getting started documentation

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool! I attempted a very primitive version of this for generating band names[1]. Now I'm tempted to port it to Rant :) One bit of advice though - the "getting started"…
      dandelany on HN

Questions

  • Does it work on Linux?

    From 1 comment
  • How to keep a reference to a generated term

    From 1 comment
    • Sorry, newbie here. Is there some sort of way to keep a reference to a generated term? For example if I generated the name "Mike" and wanted to use that same name several times.
      personjerry on HN

Alternatives named

  • Spintax

    From 1 comment
    • Looks like an advanced version of "spintax"[0], which is popular amongst seo blackhatters. I could certainly see this as a replacement. [0] http://umstrategies.com/what-is-spintax/
      troels on HN
  • Polygen

    From 1 comment
    • This reminds me of polygen[1,2] that I discovered among the many programs packaged for Debian... but looks at least in some ways friendlier. Is it very…
      e12e on HN
  • Protodata

    From 1 comment
    • I think these languages for generating data are really useful. There is one called Protodata (https://github.com/evincarofautumn/protodata) for generating binary data. From the…
      jdp on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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