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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting paper that I intend to dig into more carefully, but I kind of wish that a paper "for the Working Programmer" used a language like Python rather than Haskell. I'm aware that Haskell has a very nice type system for doing things like this -- and I'm a language nerd myself, so It's not that -- but it just seems like it would be more practical in something more "mainstream."

That said, it is interesting from what I've read so far.

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Perhaps try this instead?

http://www.nltk.org/book

That book teaches you how to accomplish NLP tasks using NLTK, but does not teach you how to accomplish those tasks without the aid of the toolkit.

Yeah, but all theory is included :-)

Perhaps try this instead? http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/

we have this book in the office in dead tree form and I think it is quite good, but it's not a "working programmer" text in my opinion.

I think nltk in combination with another reference is a great way to learn. You can start out with a small project, have it functional off the ground, then dig deeper.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... is excellent as is http://metaoptimize.com/qa/a stackoverflow style site which is active albeit specialized.

The title is likely a hat tip to a famous functional textbook: _ML for the Working Programmer_.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/

...which is in turn a nod to _Categories for the Working Mathematician_ by Saunders Mac Lane (as is Clocksin's _Clause and Effect: Prolog Programming for the Working Programmer_, and probably several other books.)

We love it!

Or maybe it's a cover-up to bring fun languages to the working programmer.

I may try to translate the examples into Javascript (CommonJS platform, not client-side .. on second thought, I may simply do it on NodeJS with Coffeescript) - just so I can learn the topic better. I find that much like taking notes during a lecture, it helps me retain the knowledge better.

Maybe you should try to do the same with python? :)

Agreed, I saw Haskell in the TOC and stopped reading. Still, an interesting project - and about as appropriate for "working" programmers as Larry Paulson's book, so no issues with the title.

It'd be easy enough to rewrite most of the examples in another language anyway (I'd hope), even if elegance is lost in the process...

It is practical if it gets the job done.

I was just wondering if anyone's done something like this for Ruby.

I doubt it, given that Ruby has virtually no traction in NLP circles. That's also why all the good toolkits target other languages.

However, "translating" Python examples into relatively idiomatic Ruby shouldn't too much of a problem if you really want to go down that path.

"translating" Python examples into relatively idiomatic Ruby shouldn't too much of a problem if you really want to go down that path

Really good point -- thanks for that.

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