oneliners

Files:

• ONELINERS: a collection of more or less witty oneliners (sayings or quotes) gathered from the interwebz
• split.py: generates the data/ dir
• data/: a directory of numbered single-oneliner files, plus a file len with the number of them
• randomOneliner.*: programs whose purpose is to pull a single random oneliner via http(s)
• randomOneliner: executable compiled from the go code (linux/amd64)

But why?

• it's a poor man's microservice that works without any executable code (server-side) and can be hosted statically
• it's an exercise in coding the exact same (client-side) functionality in different languages
• it's simple and easy to understand

Dependencies:

• python: python3.6, requests module (pip3 install requests, or apt install python3-requests)
• go: just the standard golang environment, I used go1.12.2
• javascript: node.js, node-fetch (npm install node-fetch -g)
• bash (.sh): curl; shuf (you may not have heard of it, but it's in linux coreutils, so probably every linux has it)

First observations:

• python: the most terse and easy to understand code
• golang: man, error handling in go is a drag. Exceptions are not such a dumb idea after all. And the executables are huge (even when stripped)
• javascript (node.js): all that asynchronicity can be a headache when the task you want to perform is in reality synchronous.

Notes:

• the compiled executable probably shouldn't be here, but not everyone has a Go build environment handy -- although it took me about three minutes to get one on my laptop.
• at least on my distro, npm modules installed with -g are not getting found by default. Solved by adding export NODE_PATH=/usr/local/lib/node_modules to my .bashrc
• golang's math/rand is tricky: by default it seeds the pseudorandom source deterministically. If you want "random" results, you must seed it yourself. In most prng libs it's the other way around.
• curl is powerful (in case you didn't know).

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comments to: Robert@Budzynski.xyz