I work on, but the coincidental name sameness probably caught my attention! Duckling is a date parsing library for Clojure, but it handles date parsing in a fairly unique fashion. Earlier this week I ran across a really fascinating project called Duckling . This isn't the Duckling project thatwork on, but the coincidental name sameness probably caught my attention! Duckling is a date parsing library for Clojure, but it handles date parsing in a fairly unique fashion.





From the Duckling website:

Duckling is “almost” a Probabilistic Context Free Grammar .

Although I am no NLP expert (it is on my long and growing list of things to study one of these days), I was able to get the just from the explanation and the examples combined. Just look at some of the strings Duckling is able to successfully parse:

“the 1st of march” “last week” “a quarter to noon” “thirty two celsius” “2 inches” “the day before labor day 2020”

These don't even have to be dates. Duckling's approach is generalized in a way that the library itself doesn't require special handling of dates, only that it's training set includes sufficient samplings of date (and other) text.





What stands out to me is that libraries like this are not just solving a problem, but are actually solving the problem of solving the problem. Programmers shouldn't spend their time parsing a million different ways language can describe the same or very similar things, because software can do it for us. And, as programmers, we need to be more aware about what the computers we work with every day are really capable of. When the compiler was invented, programmers were worried they're jobs would become obsolete, but look at us: we still have barely progressed, and some times I worry that is on purpose.





These little problems don't have to be hard, but by insisting that we keep re-solving them in the most difficult and manual ways, we're severely limiting the upward potentials of our craft.





actually fixes errors in your Javascript. More of this please! Programming tools can be so much more advanced than they are today, but instead of seeing any real progress, we just see new text editors copying a new combination of feature sets of older text editors. Along similar thoughts I recently came across Fix My JS , which automatically lints andyour Javascript. More of this please! Programming tools can be so much more advanced than they are today, but instead of seeing any real progress, we just see new text editors copying a new combination of feature sets of older text editors.









We can do so much better. Let's see more of this!



