alistairmichael.com/projects/markov-bot.md

title: Another Ebooks Bot For Telegram date: 01-08-20 Yes, I've written another markov chain bot. A markov chain was one of the first things I attempted when I was trying to learn python years ago. I made another one last year and have again used a markov chain project to help me learn a language: C++. code This one is a bot for the messaging app Telegram. You can add it to a group and it will listen to the conversation to build its markov chain databse[^2]. It will reply periodically to a random message using its last word as the seed. It looks like a reallly basic form of keyboard autocomplete. It can also import plain-text files. This is useful if you want it to loosely imitate the prose of a specific author. But this one does support arbitrary order markov chains and uses an SQLite database instead of json save-files like the last one. It is also structured to (theoretically) allow you to swap the SQLite database for say... a posgtres databse. Because performance is what C++ is about. If it seems over-engineered it's because I tried to ram in as many c++ features as possible in order to help me learn the language. My main method of learning has just been reading the first third of A Tour of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup, watching random C++ conference talks[^1], searching online, and referring to cppreference.com. Its not the worst way of learning a language, and I have to say I prefer textbooks to videos or tutorials just thanks to the pacing, but I started to wish my University did an "Intro To Software Engineering in C++" course, like they do for Java. Having a lecturer guide you through the main bases of the language over 13 weeks is immensely helpful. Anyway, there is still some design and debugging work to do with this project. The more significant problems are the structure of the SQL generation and binding code, and the structure of the queries. The former because its a mess and hard to maintain, and the latter because queries cannot be batched in transactions I dont know of a way of doing it without just gitting gud at SQL. I also kind of regret using this C++ sql library. It is very nice, but the plain C SQL library also seems good enough, and would let me practice RAII. Theres plenty of work I can do on it to make it a more useable meme robot, but I don't know if I will. I've already had 1 year of having a robotic talking parrot in our groupchat and I don't know if I should instantiate another. This Program Is Bad, but it did teach me some valuable lessons like: - How bad ld linker errors are - How ugly C++ syntax is - The sheer number of footguns present in the C++ language - How to properly declare then define classes - The hellscape that is build systems - The hellscape that is libraries - I didnt even use that many libraries really... - How slow the c++ compiler (and linting tools) are compared to C. - I wish I had time to learn Go. In all seriousness though, C++ is a pretty scary language, but still a very interesting one. I really need to think of more creative projects though. [^1]: I did solve one bug because I remembered it for a talk so it wasn't just exam-study-procrastination when I watched them last semester. [^2]: It does not store verbatim messages only word-pairs, word-triplets... depending on the order of the markov chain; and how many times they occurred.