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madlibs-intro.md @master — view markup · raw · history · blame
Years ago, I worked at the [Berkeley Self-Paced Center], which is a wonderful institution. It was designed to be a self-directed, one-on-one center where people could go to learn a new programming language (or sometimes programming environment) in a structured way but at the student's own pace1.
One of the early assignments in these courses I really liked, because it was (I felt) a program that was not particularly complicated or large, but at the same time conveyed several useful, practical concepts that don't show up in Hello World or Project Euler examples.
The example was a simple MadLibs program. MadLibs is a simple game in which one is presented first with a series of blanks accompanied by requests for particular classes of words—sometimes parts of speech such as nouns or verbs, sometimes more specific descriptors such as food items or animals—and then those are stitched into a sentence, where they produce humorously nonsensical phrases.2
The program in question required that the MadLib be chosen randomly from a list of possible ones, and that the blanks be requested in a random order which did not necessarily correspond to their ordering in the template phrase.
A program to implement this would necessarily involve several tasks in the relevant language: input and output from a user, randomness, some kind of data structure for keeping the intermediate values, and possibly some kind of string processing. If one adds a small extra stipulation—that the MadLibs templates must be read from a file—then it also involves file IO, making it a good whirlwind tour of a language's features in practice.
What I'd like to do is use this MadLibs program as a way of exploring other programming languages, and in particular, niche, emerging, or forgotten languages which people might not be widely familiar with.
The MadLibs Program
The rough steps which will be performed in most versions of the program are as follows:
- Open a file named
template.mad. This file contains one or more lines that have sentences with certain parts inside matching curly braces, e.g.
This {noun} will {verb}!
After this file is read in, one of the lines is selected at random to be the template used.
- Split that template into two sequences: the literal text segments and the part-of-speech segments, as in
["This", "will", "!"] [ "noun", "verb" ]
- Print out requests for the part-of-speech segments, read in lines from the user, and fill them into the template. Do this in random order but still filling in the correct gap.
Give me a verb: jump Give me a noun: dog
- Print the resulting sentence
This dog will jump!
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At least, nominally; in practice, the large influx of students at the end of the semester—who had forgotten about their enrollment until on the verge of failing—led us to experiment with various ways of imposing a loose schedule on students, so that we could try to even out the frequency of student visits. ↩
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I played this a lot as a child, in which most of the words chosen were scatological or otherwise puerile. Which is to say: most of the blanks were filled in with some variation on "poop". ↩