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by yjftsjthsd-h 42 days ago
> The source code consists of 660,000 words, which is 12% more words than the entire English edition of the novel War and Piece.

Typo, or is there a spoof I should go read?

2 comments

War and Peace is about 590,000 words. Tiny compared to the full Harry Potter collection (about 1 million words over the 7 books), but long for a single book.
They're referring to the typo in the title, "Piece" vs "Peace".

I also thought they were contending the word count before noticing. Even remarked how I find this a weird metric, given that code is not prose [0], but then I deleted that once I picked up on what's going on.

[0] comparing the output of `wc -w` with the word counts of books I'm reasonably sure will be super off

edit: ran a calc, substituting out symbols (but not underscores), digits, and comments yields a 390K word count compared to the 660K cited. not excluding the comments yields 600K, so more than a third of all words in the sources are comments.

ahh interesting thanks

I guess it's related to the phenomenon where you can read words relatively easily as long as the first and last letters are correct and the rest of the letters are there.

https://wire.insiderfinance.io/the-brains-power-to-read-jumb...

The ten main Malazan books are 3.3 million words, apparently. No wonder it took me such a long time to get through them.
Perhaps he was dictating.

Does it say anything else? Just 'Aaaarggghhhh'?

Doubt it considering that Daniel Stenberg is Swedish. English dictation when you speak English as a second language with an accent is quite annoying.
Voice input works really well for people speaking English with a Swedish accent. I think the accent of most educated Swedes is mostly a case of prosody. For sure there are some sounds we say slightly differently than native English speakers. We often have some trouble with /s/ and /z/, but I don't know, "war and peace", I think that's easily understood.

Source: voice typing this with Swedish vocal chords, and only had to correct "different lives" to "differently", and add /[^\w\s]/.

Android voice input works with kids using both English and native words, here in India. The country runs schools in 25+ primary languages, each with dialects, so a TV/phone with voice input is more marvelous than the nitpicks discussed here.
I understand completely. You don't want to know what the machine produced, when I asked it for "a new display".