Nicolas Lehuen's Weblog

When I was young (I’m talking days of yore, here, about ten years ago) and innocent, I was an engineering student at the INSA (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées, meaning National Institute for Applied Sciences). I was there for 5 years, and two of the best teachers I had were not math or physics teachers, but English teachers. Their courses were very important to me because they not only taught English, but also how to make a clear presentation and manage meetings. I’m using this every day, now. If I compare this to the tons of math I’ve learned (sometimes at 30 hours a week doses, the rest being computer science), which I’m using at somewhere near 5% now, the yield of those English courses is clearly superior. Mr. and Mrs Souillard, thank you ! I hope my awkward writing won’t be a disgrace to your teaching standards.

Anyway, Mr. Souillard also taught optional Japanese lessons, but I’ve decided not to follow them, because, you know, I had much more interesting things to do, like more maths or physics (and, to be comprehensive, drink booze, play video games and make out with girls).

So, it looks like there is a justice, after all, because my pytst code has been noticed by some Japanese people, and I can’t understand what they write about it. Masaki Yatsu contacted me today to announce that he ported pytst to Ruby, apparently using SWIG. He also added support for multibyte character sets, which is obviously pretty important in Japanese. This is the part I’ve understood, because he wrote me in English. Unfortunately, his blog is in Japanese. Check out the Google Translation result, if you want to have some fun. I can barely understand 25% of what Masaki writes (and to be clear, it’s only my fault .

As for odz’s blog entry, it was much worse, because I couldn’t get whether he had better or worse results using pytst versus Perl regexp (it turns out my code performs ten times better for his use case, yay!).

I’m not sure one or two years of learning Japanese would have helped me much in this situation, though. I guess in the best case I would have the same level of understanding that Google Translation gives me. But at least I wouldn’t feel such a dork, instead I would be bragging about my deep knowledge of kanji.

Anyway, it’s good to see one’s code reused by people from the other side of the planet, with different alphabets and character encodings, apparently without too many problems. I’m getting a warm and fuzzy feeling from that .

Incidentally, since I’ve posted a comment on odz’s blog, some spam crawler has fetched my email address, and I now receive spam in japanese. Wonderful. My bayesian anti-spam filter is so happy to get all those new words to learn ! Actually it’s not.