

Show HN: Manhood – a powerful templating language for random text generation - TheBerkin
https://github.com/TheBerkin/Manhood

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shadowmint
It's easy to be critical, especially here, but here are a few thoughts:

\- Your DSL is really obscure. The syntax needs a cleanup, or it needs a lot
more examples in the documentation showing how to generate useful content from
this.

\- Names are important. This wasn't a good choice; I'm just going to leave it
at that.

\- It would be really useful to preface the documentation getting started
guide with something like: Here's an example of a problem this solves that
other tools don't solve, or that is difficult to do with other tools. Here's a
comparison of other similar tools and how it's more difficult to do blah with
them.

Templating languages are a dime a dozen, and if you write a new one, no one
will care.

...but this isn't really a templating language; it's a procedural content
generator using a DSL.

I think you could do a lot of interesting things with the ideas in this, but
it needs to be explained clearly.

Hope that's helpful. :)

~~~
TheBerkin
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.

~~~
miah_
You should worry more about the attention you're going to attract from that
name. I'll re-iterate the above comment that its really a bad choice.

Naming things is one of the hardest problems period.

The naming problem is felt by all, but programmers really feel it. Go ask any
parent how long they deliberated on their childs name.

I recently had a very difficult time describing a project that I'm working on
with a coworker because of its name. After much discussion we realized we were
both on the same page; but the name really threw them off. I am continuing
work on the project, but also considering a new name. (though I can take a
while to change the projects name as it shouldn't offend anybody)

For reference: Go do some cursory searches around 'misogyny in tech'

Lastly; here is another project with a similar name. You can see the result
when this hit front page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268)

------
albertoleal
Be cool if there is something in JavaScript (e.g. node.js).

~~~
TheBerkin
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.

