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I'd be really curious to know how long it actually took Norvig to write the spell checker. It seems like such a simple idea and piece of code after you've read
by razhab 5y ago
I'd be really curious to know how long it actually took Norvig to write the spell checker. It seems like such a simple idea and piece of code after you've read it but he suggests it took him a transcontinental flight worth of time.
That, to me, is surprising in a potentially interesting way. Knowing that an expert like Norvig might still take hours to write such a seemingly simple program suggests the problem is harder than it appears in retrospect.
- ghusbands 5y agoIn general, with any project you can find online, you can find people claiming they would have done it faster. It's more tiresome than it is interesting. The program is simple once you know its shape, but there may have been quite some time spent in consideration of how it should work or the details of the edit distance. Also, most programmers overestimate how fast they can write something, and there are plenty of claims that studies show that programmers average only ten lines a day of code. It doesn't mean the problem is necessarily hard or that it needed to be for it to take time. And flights can be tiring and distracting.