Show HN: Define – A command-line dictionary app written in Go

Show HN: Define – A command-line dictionary app written in Go(github.com)

22 points by Rican7 8 years ago | 19 comments

thisacctforreal 8 years ago |

It's very pretty, but unfortunately it looks like just a wrapper for a few dictionary HTTP APIs.

It won't be replacing Dictionary.app, but it does look like a a good subject for learning Go.

jchook 8 years ago | |

I use dict with "gcide" and "moby-thesaurus".

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dictd#Hosting_Offline_D...

bberenberg 8 years ago | |

What do you want from it beyond this?

thisacctforreal 8 years ago | | |

Obviously local dictionary support, I'd prefer to retain the privacy of the words I use and look up.

spyspy 8 years ago |

Browsing through the source, this strikes me as very over-engineered to just hit a few APIs, parse the responses and print text to the command line.

Rican7 8 years ago | |

Ha, that's such a classic HN comment.

I appreciate you taking the time to look at the source. I used this, like I do most of my side projects, as an opportunity to learn a few things.

I wanted a generic abstraction so that multiple sources could be used. Originally I didn't want or think of the need to support multiple sources, but it quickly became apparent how necessary that was when looking at the quality of free vs paid vs personal-key-required sources.

In any case, thanks for checking it out!

spyspy 8 years ago | | |

Sorry, not trying to be a put down. Just a lot of code smells that I see reviewing other people's go at work. Things like the abundance of interfaces, defining your own IO and error handling, use of reflection, and using third party libraries for simple tasks. I'll definitely say the code is at least clean and well documented, so kudos there.

rhencke 8 years ago | | |

I actually thought the PanicWriter was very clever. It's a clean solution to a very commonly ignored error return value - operations on stdout/stderr.

icholy 8 years ago | |

No kidding, it just kept going and going.

alfonsodev 8 years ago |

It looks great!, would you accept PRa for adding other languages than English ?

Rican7 8 years ago | |

Absolutely I would! Any contributions would be greatly appreciated!

petee 8 years ago | |

beauty of github - if you want to do it, just do it and submit the pr: even they don't take it, others might see and want that too

patrickmn 8 years ago |

I like your thinking :) https://github.com/patrickmn/define

Rican7 8 years ago | |

Haha. Nice!