I Made a English Dictionary Front-End for Terminals

myxi@feddit.nl to Programming@programming.dev – 135 points –

This project was interesting. Recently, I've been digging into the functional programming paradigm. This is one of my first tries at it. I've been doing OOP until recently, but this project really was impressive to me. The whole implementation took about nine hours. Functional programming is much less convoluted. I spent more time programming than deciding on a good name for a certain identifier.

Not only is functional programming more efficient, but I can also see that it's much less tedious to write automated tests for. I only have to take care of the local scope of the function I am writing a test for; there is no need to deal with the parent's inherited mess or even any parent's mere state. I just have to write the test for the function.

I have scraped the Cambridge Dictionary to collect the data.

The project is licensed under MIT at:

https://github.com/eeriemyxi/novi

https://git.envs.net/myxi/novi

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I saw "terminal" and "dictionary" and thought this was going to be using the DICT protocol to retrieve definitions. If that's not supported, could that be added?

Not for any reason other than I think it's cool to look up stuff remotely using nothing more than curl. But this is definitely easier to read.

You mean, like, support for the dict protocol for this program's interface? I am also scraping a dictionary's data, so I am a little confused.

What I mean is, this program draws from a scraped database, right? Is there any reason it couldn't also search an online database using DICT, to potentially get more definitions that aren't in the Cambridge Dictionary?

Excellent work, btw

Ah that. That shouldn't be a lot of work as all the visual stuff are done by separate functions. I can do it. I will look into it.

Hi, I spent some time trying out the dictd package. I also read this protocol's specification. As things are right now, each host-name would require its own parser, because I couldn't notice a very similar pattern between them. Webster, Jargon, wn, all these have their own standardization for including synonyms and examples.

The specification doesn't enforce any pattern on the definitions either. I don't think it's going to be very useful even if I do implement it because the parsers are going to be quite complicated.

I use dictd-client on openbsd. CLI app that talks to dict.org