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TheBerkinon Rant – An all-purpose procedural text engine

Hi, most of this is shorthand for either several functions or functions with longer names. For example, [rs:10;\s] is the same as [rep:10][sep:\s].

The last example is used to synchronize results between dictionary queries. This particular one is short for "output the same word as any other query to this table with the match ID 'a'."

In retrospect it was a poor decision to use shorthand forms in prominent example snippets, and I'll consider revising them.

TheBerkinon Rant – An all-purpose procedural text engine

Fixed. Thanks for pointing it out.

TheBerkinon Rant – An all-purpose procedural text engine

Rant dev here-- Wow! This has to be the most interesting use case I've heard of in a while.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

The modifiers are abundant. Also try the "dog", "alien", "old", "dark", and "rotten" varieties. That's just scratching the surface.

Those modifiers work on any other base colors, as well. They even stack. Want "old dog shit"? I have just what you need.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

Thanks, this is really helpful. Looks like I'll be adding a lot of new filters.

It's not just a simple color mixer; it's actually a "filter compositing engine". I write rules for each keyword by hand, currently. It gives me more control over how different words affect the final color.

(I'll add a rule for dried blood)

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

This was actually the inspiration for the project.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

Great idea. I only speak English and (some) German, but I'll see what I can do to accommodate color names in other popular languages.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

That was the plan at first, but I wanted even oddly specific requests to return something somewhat reasonable, so I went with a word analysis method that associates certain words with filters that are added from right to left.

Not nearly as neat or all-encompassing as something like what you describe, but it does allow me a bit more control over how different words affect the output.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

That's a cool idea, though I don't know any search engine APIs that don't have a ton of restrictions on them. Google used to have a wonderful image search API, but it's either deprecated/discontinued by now.

I'll keep looking around, though.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

Added.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

I've never heard that word before in my life. Will add!

TheBerkinon Show HN: Manhood – a powerful templating language for random text generation

Can you clarify on what you mean by this? I am looking into implementing MH in Javascript right now, so hopefully you will see that somewhere in the future.

TheBerkinon Show HN: Manhood – a powerful templating language for random text generation

Hey, thanks for the comment.

You're right about the classification of the language. I'm not fully versed in the different terms for these things, so I went with what made the most sense at the time. I can see how that would be confusing to people.

The name is something of a joke. The idea for the language began with a random story generator, so it seemed like a good idea to name the language something that reflected the comical nature of the output (without being blatantly vulgar). I understand why that might be a less-than-ideal name in a professional environment. But it grabs your attention, so there's that.

Your point about providing comparisons between identical code in MH and other languages is a good one. I'll look into adding a few of those. I do understand that it is imperative to distinguish one's product from the rest. This would help that greatly.

I'll work on adding more examples throughout the docs to clarify how the language is meant to be used. Every design decision relating to the syntax was done for a reason. Many people who worked with MH thought it was a bit hard at first, but they quickly got used to it and found it fun to work with. I'm pretty optimistic.