Old stuff

Now I learned I can add an html page with javascript to the Google Page Creator site by simply uploading it as a file and link to it, I added an old javascript-based concordancer/word counter to the CasualConc site. This is probably useless for people and I'm not sure if I need it on the site, but I just wanted to keep it somewhere and because this old script is the basis of CasualConc, I think it's the right place (for me).

I wrote this script about 2 years ago when I was playing with javascript. At that time, I wanted to learn javascript, which I just started to learn a few months before that. I only knew MS-BASIC before that. When I started to play with javascript, I figured the best way to learn it is to write something with it. I first wrote s few scripts for my colleague at the work to save a repetitive task. Then, I wanted to do something for my self. I always wanted to do something with corpus linguistics. I found a few sites that did it with javascript and many scripts in Perl. With trial and error, and a lot of revisions, this javascript page was written. The page says it's version 6, but the script version is 61 (its on the file name of the script file). But then I learned limitations of javascript as a tool for corpus analysis. Then I tried Perl because that seemed to be what everyone used (and a lot of people are using it for text analysis), but somehow, it didn't appeal to me (or I wasn't/isn't smart enough to learn it). Then a year later, I used Ruby for something at work and somehow I liked it (still like it). I didn't know Python, which I learned when I was learning Ruby. Another big plus was that because Ruby was originally and is still developed mainly by Japanese people, I found a lot of documents in Japanese. This and the inclusion of RubyCocoa in Leopard is why CasualConc exists now. I think I wrote something like this in the very first post on this blog, but anyway, it's fun to use Ruby though my scripts are still primitive. I hope I can learn more about Ruby and improve CasualConc. What I want is time, but now I need to spend more time on other more important stuff...