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Comment by diskzero | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting. When I first looked at some of the examples, I initially dismissed it, but then I realized there was some additional work being done in addition to some of the more obvious interpretations..

I ran some of my own code snippets and the results were pretty impressive. I was having a lot of fun before I got rate limited. Bummer!

I am still not sure of the exact business case. It this for non-technical people to get a plain language explanation of the code? For junior developers? I would like to try larger chunks of code to see how the system performs.

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Which explanations did you like best? What about them impressed you?

I'll raise the rate limit to a very high amount in a moment!

> I am still not sure of the exact business case.

You ask a good question. I'm hoping HN helps figure that out! I think it can help Senior and Junior Developers to onboard to new codebases, especially those with new concepts.

The language used in the descriptions is easy to understand. It reads like standard conversational English.

It is minor, but I would like to see better text layout.

What I think I would really, really want, is integration with VSCode/Sublime/etc. where the interpretations were interleaved within the actual source code and could be folded down. I would like to be able to correlate the source codes lines to the interpretations.

Thanks, I will update our info to say "conversational English."

Can you explain what you mean by text layout? Do you want it justified? Formatted differently?

> What I think I would really, really want, is integration with VSCode/Sublime/etc. where the interpretations were interleaved within the actual source code and could be folded down. I would like to be able to correlate the source codes lines to the interpretations.

Cool idea. Something like Literate Programming, where the explanations are stored in the code file? Or more like a dynamic tool that just shows dynamically generated explanations inline?

If you want to go down the Literate Programming rabbit hole with me, I have a lot of ideas around that. Your system could be applied to parsing source code and coming up with conversational descriptions, or even more exciting, going from conversation, descriptive text into source code. You are in the process of building a corpus that can used in both directions.

As for the text layout, just something a little prettier with improved spacing between descriptive blocks, bullet point and links that reference to the parsed source code. It should be just as pleasant to look at as any well-designed piece of online prose. I realize that design is subjective.

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