Before people get up in arms about iA patents, see this tweet where they announced that they're dropping their patents pending: https://twitter.com/iA/statuses/416393539182796800

That aside, this is pretty cool. I'm not sure if I'd ever use it, but it would be cool to see a vim plugin that offers similar functionality.

Here's the discussion with DHH that led to this decision:

http://storify.com/nthnclrk/conversation-with-dhh-ia-and-ste...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966528. This is pretty much the best response I can imagine.

Couple of `git` points: why are you committing binaries to your master branch? Personally, I also won't be moving anything from a random git repo into /usr/local/bin...

>Personally, I also won't be moving anything from a random git repo into /usr/local/bin...

How is a random developer page offering an app download any better?

For those that are worried, the source is there to inspect and compile. For those that aren't, there's reduced friction. It's a young project and I could move the binary elsewhere, but I'm not sure that would change your concern?

Is there an alternate process you would suggest?

I believe GP was saying two separate things. First of all, it's unusual to commit binaries to source control, because they can't be merged, etc. Second of all, he personally isn't comfortable with binaries and would rather compile from source.

It'd be more traditional to release binaries separately, maybe using the following: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

Ah, I'd missed that update. Thanks! I prefer this to the current workflow.

Indeed, thanks for clarifying. The linked post sounds like a good workflow.

That's natural language syntax, BTW. And just part-of-speech tag info at that, not full-on syntax-tree-aware stuff. Still, cool. Didn't know OS X had that stuff built-in.

What's the point here? Is this a demonstration of prior art? Or is it just demonstrating that a patent's technology is easily re-implemented?

Because if it's the latter, that doesn't really prove anything. Patents are to protect technologies/inventions that are far easier to produce after invention than before. That's the good part of a patent, when the patent system works as designed.

If it's a demonstration of prior art though, that's pretty cool - it might help to make it more obvious, though.

It's neither prior art (though it was started prior to the recent patent publicity), nor a re-implementation (as stated in the readme, it's just a wrapper around OS X's NSLinguisticTagger).

Why can't it just be a useful tool? I'm looking forward to using it while writing project documentation and will be working on editor plugins using the JSON formatted output (https://github.com/stephencelis/syn/commit/d2d36473f7295c6cf...).

>What's the point here? Is this a demonstration of prior art? Or is it just demonstrating that a patent's technology is easily re-implemented?

No patent. iA took that back. One wasn't possible anyway -- not only this is 90% Apple's API, but even the UI implementation of this particular feature was already shown by Apple in WWDC 2011.

It's an invitation to IA to dig themselves a deeper hole. :-)

OSX has built-in NLP tools? I tried doing a google search for it, but I can't find any documentation. Do any of you know anything about it?

Tools, as in command line tools, I'm not so sure about. But Cocoa has NSLinguisticTagger. Good overviews:

http://www.objc.io/issue-7/linguistic-tagging.html http://nshipster.com/nslinguistictagger/

And SDK documentation:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/...

Thanks!

If I find some time I may write a plugin for Sublime Text :)

The OP is working on a nicer machine-readable output for exactly this purpose, though I think he's hoping for a Vim plugin.

I'm also be wanting a Sublime plugin, preferably one that can cycle the selection through tagged words and allow editing. I started hacking one out last night, but got stuck on the complexity of the plugin architecture. I'll update this if I ever get something working.