A language learners’ forum

The problem with you method is there is no user validation. Because you have to log into Twitter in the 6wc each participant is identified. With email your email address validated you because you would have had to log into your emails system. So not really being nice, just keeping malicious people from messing up your score

rdearman wrote:The problem with you method is there is no user validation. Because you have to log into Twitter in the 6wc each participant is identified. With email your email address validated you because you would have had to log into your emails system. So not really being nice, just keeping malicious people from messing up your score

Is there no facility in phpBB that could be used to validate users for external pages...?

As for not liking semantic whitespace, I was once the same. I still don't like it, but I really get Guido's point about the job of spaces in brace-delimited languages being ambiguous. If spaces mean nothing to a computer, there's nothing to stop anyone using the spacing in a misleading way that implies semantics that don't match the exact semantics of the { ... } structuring.

Guido was right -- it's just that his solution is now suboptimal. We should not be using plaintext editors for programming any more. Our editors should be smart. A C-like should have *no* leading whitespace in its source file, but the editor should be able to render it with lines indented automatically. That takes us one step more into visual programming, because for automatic indentation to work, you can't have the programmer independently marking start and end block tokens -- ie. { and } have to be treated as a single semantic unit, meaning that the programmer would have a choice of "Insert new block", "convert to block" and "move line inside block".

Such a non-literal text editor would also have to opportunity to render things as tables, something that has to be done by non-semantic whitespace at the moment, which Guido is actively against, but has at least made possible in Python.
eg:
Notice how I've (unconciously!) switched between putting the commas in a vertical pattern (representing column separator lines) and putting them directly after the data, which means that there's no line (eg from 123 down to 15745) and instead the column line appears to be implied by the contents ("pop" and "burst").

I personally find this idea of lining things up helps me remember what sort of data is expected where and put in the right stuff (which I think is particularly important in contexts where arguments are optional -- I'm thinking of JavaScript here in particular!) and I typically start doing it, but then when I get to the fourth of fifth line and type lots, I don't tend to go back and edit the previous lines to maintain the table structure -- I only end up continuing with the new column width... until I get bored after typing multiple lines that are narrower and switch back to the original spacing.

Sorry for going wildly off-topic... I guess I'm abusing this forum by using it as a prompt for recalling all the computer programming stuff.

Cainntear wrote:Is there no facility in phpBB that could be used to validate users for external pages...?

Yes, but the 6WC and the SC are independent of the forum, you don't need to have an account here in order to participate in the challenges. People from reddit and other places participate. So you need to have a common validation scheme, which twitter provided. Could use Google Oauth since most people have a google account. This is a good point however for the web-based or other input. Using a common oauth would be useful.

I was just going to switch everything to Mastodon and a federated login... It is something which needs more thought.

My point regarding whitespace as a delimiter goes along with your idea of moving to a visual editor. You can't see whitespace, so if you want visual programming then you need stuff you can see.... like, oh I don't know, perhaps a ; or maybe a {} or perhaps []. And because in C whitespace is irrelevant I can line things up the way I want, and the compiler will ignore it. I don't like to be forced to line things up the way someone else says I have to. Power to the people! Down with the man! Screw Guido. Anyway, if you want to continue this argument, we'll have to do it somewhere else.

The github page is here: https://github.com/rdearman/GenericChallenge if you're interested.

Yes, I know the python code is an ugly and basic hack job, but I don't normally use python. I'm set out some short term and longer term goals if anyone is interested.

So no more tweets from now onwards. When is it up and running? I stopped jotting my hours for reading and listening in a notebook so your platform is the only place to record my stuff and therefore to have a bird's eye view to feel good

german2k01 wrote:So no more tweets from now onwards. When is it up and running? I stopped jotting my hours for reading and listening in a notebook so your platform is the only place to record my stuff and therefore to have a bird's eye view to feel good

According to the Twitter developer feed the API is still working, so you should still be able to tweet your statistics. It may mean however that you will not get a confirmation tweet that your tweet was processed. However, you'll be able to see if it was processed since the updates happen every 5 minutes.

OK, so even though Twitter is still working, I've been testing an email bot for the Super Challenge with the assistance from some people here on the Forum.

I'm also about 90% complete on a python script to do updates from Mastodon.

You can check out the progress here:
https://github.com/rdearman/GenericChallenge

Once I am comfortable that I've managed to get SC updates right, I plan to start a new DB and begin working on a more "generic challenge" bot as per the requirements here.

If you have any programming experience in either PHP or Python, I could use some help. The plan at the moment is to make the web-interface with PHP since all it really needs to do is read the DB, and all the bots (email, twitter, mastodon, etc) done in python.

rdearman wrote:If you have any programming experience in either PHP or Python, I could use some help. The plan at the moment is to make the web-interface with PHP since all it really needs to do is read the DB, and all the bots (email, twitter, mastodon, etc) done in python.

Is there anything I can help with in particular? Previously I mentioned I could attempt to make something that could interface with Google Spreadsheets or Google Forms, but not sure if that would be helpful at this exact moment?

As I mentioned before, I don't program professionally, I mostly write Python scripts, so I don't want to step on any toes or ruin the code base with my inexperience