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Comment by cenazoic | Hacker News Reader

(Read the paper, didn’t watch the video)

I am a 54-year old undergraduate in computer science. I don’t know from Curry-Howard (or Hurry-Coward), but this paper made me giggle with delight and glee. (Knuth invokes this delight in me as well, although I don’t understand most of his writings, yet.)

If nothing else, it’s inspired me to implement half-ass easter-egg achievement systems in any future ‘serious’ software I write.

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That also struck me as a great way to make software more whimsical. Imagine if you randomly got an "Achievement unlocked!" message if you churn through more than 10 GB of data in a single invocation of `grep` for the first time or something. So many possibilities!

For something user facing sure but trying to debug why _sometimes_ my grep job hangs with large data dumps because my popen3 didn't know to consume from stderr because of your whimsicle message would be pretty rage inducing

Why isn't your shell consuming stderr? Errors happen.

If the UI is my shell then it is. If it's part of a larger script being executed by python embedded in a cron job wrapped in a burrito, it may not be

Wrappers are still responsible for proxying or handling errors and wrappers that fail to do so are wrapping poorly.

Don't bring monads into this

If you've got Python, you shouldn't be running grep within it, just open the file with Python and search through it in the usual ways. Far less flaky than a subprocess.

Shouldn't, sure. But people use software in all kinds of sub-optimal ways, and it would behoove an author to make sure that it doesn't fail dramatically when this happens.

I'm not even sure it's suboptimal to shell out to grep instead of writing a bespoke search in Python. It would depend on the amount of data I'm sifting through.

Grep is very optimized for what it does.

You misunderstand entirely how much the author of any software with "achievements" cares about whether it works well in shell scripts and/or from python.

Pretty much your fault entirely for choosing to use my tool but not reading at least the README.md, which would explicitly state that there might be achievement texts on stderr. Anyway why output that stuff on the standard streams anyway when every modern OS has a perfectly fine window popup functionality with associated sound effects.

100%-ing it would be a fun speedrun.

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