Comment by erikb
14 years ago
It seems the author of that article doesn't know that spell checking, translating and understanding text are actually major features of pretty new software, too. I don't know how the spellcheckers are for English, but in German they really suck since years. You can't just let MS Word autocorrect your text, because the spell checker will insert more errors than it can remove. So when I want to find out, how to spell a word correctly in German, I just use the Google search bar. Why? Because they consider spell checking a hard task TODAY!
Spell checking is not about comparing a list of words to what the user wrote and tell him what didn't match. It's much more about understanding the users intention and helping him shaping that intention into an officially recognised grammar/spelling. Example: "then" is a correct word. But in the context of "Google's spell check is better then Word's" "then" is actually wrong. (Google also doesn't tell you about that mistake but the first search result actually contains a "than", which is recognised as what you actually meant)
I hope I could make it clear, why I think it still is a major feature to have the best spell checker and I think, the title really should be revised.
Yes. This whole article struck me as the spell checking equivalent to "I can build Map Reduce in 5 lines of language N" meme that went around a while ago.
"""It seems the author of that article doesn't know that spell checking, translating and understanding text are actually major features of pretty new software, too. """
Actually it seems that everybody reading the article got the same WRONG impression.
The author full well knows what it takes to do a i18n full-featured spell checker.
That is BESIDE the point.
What he says is that doing a basic (lame ass) spell-checker in the 80s used to be a MAJOR undertaking, and now, doing EXACTLY THE SAME is trivial.
His point is not about spell-checking.
It's about modern OS, language, CPU, HD and memory conveniences, vs what one had to deal with in the olden days.