

A bot fixes spelling mistakes in github readme files - holdenk
http://blog.holdenkarau.com/2011/08/automatic-spelling-corrections-on.html

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jrockway
Interesting idea, although it would be nice if Github optionally fixed
spelling mistakes for you. Pull requests just for spelling errors have got to
be annoying. (I just run flyspell in Emacs, so I never make spelling mistakes.
Accept when I use the wrong word.)

The code is also pretty interesting. It's old-style Perl with indirect method
calls, bareword filehandles, no "use strict", and so on... but then it uses
modules that use Moose and MooseX::Traits. So we have a collection of scripts
that look like they are from 1987, but that depend on Moose. Excellent!

(Actually, this inspired me to read the source code for Net::Twitter to see if
it was using MooseX::Traits. Turns out they just copy-pasted from an older
version of MX::Traits to get their traits functionality. Weird!)

~~~
holdenk
Sorry the perl code is so poor, it was a post-clubbing quick-hack type
project. I'll clean it up when I have some free time again :)

~~~
draegtun
You may find the following CPAN modules helpful when you do your refactoring:

* Net::GitHub - <http://p3rl.org/Net::GitHub>

* Pithub - <http://p3rl.org/Pithub>

~~~
holdenk
Oh excellent. I only looked at Net::GitHub initially, but Pithub looks more
interesting.

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6ren
So git becomes the presentation component of a spellchecker - a novel and
interesting re-architecture.

You could do similar with peep-hole optimizations, bizarre bots that transform
iteration to recursion (and vice versa), transforms to immutability,
factoring-out common code, adding automatically constructed test cases ... I
wonder what else.

It would be like _helpful spam_. _EDIT_ or clippy "It looks like you're
writing a loop. Would you like help?" Actually, this could be a channel for
_code analysis as a service_. You subscribe (for fee or free), it's all hosted
and updated remotely and git-based (github public/private, or self-hosted).

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bigiain
Is anyone else as amused as I am by the juxtaposition of "I was at jwz's club"
immediately followed by "perl and regexes seemed like a good idea"?

(now he's got _two_ problems...)

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bandushrew
Man, what a fantastic idea. Mildly interesting at the moment, but start
running a static analyzer bot over everything, and its golden.

should probably be an opt-in service, but WOW it would rock.

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Mizza
I've been working on something like this recently, but I guess this guy beat
me to the punch. Here's my nearly-done rainy day code:

<https://github.com/Miserlou/WhitespaceBot> (Python)

I'd like to add some security fixing stuff too. There's plenty that can be
done here!

Bots are the secret reason why Wikipedia actually works - there's no reason
why we can't have the same benefits in open source software.

~~~
holdenk
Your whitespace bot looks nifty :) Will you post the results when you start
running it?

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cdcarter
I can't wait until I get a pull request trying to fix the spelling of my
project name.

~~~
Macha
Or for "fixes" like colour/color or centre/center.

