One of my pet peeves about my natural writing style is how I lean into complex sentences divided by commas. Left unchecked, my prose starts looking like it might be ChatGPT’s attempt at writing a blog post in the style of s-expressions. I thought it would be neat to try and write some code to help me proofread for this specific issue and improve my posts.
So much of my Python experience is from writing apps with Django that I forgot how quick and easy it is to whip up a small script that does some text processing with nothing but the standard library. As much as I appreciate static types and exhaustiveness checking in larger programs, being able to ignore edge cases that I know don’t appear in the specific input I’m concerned with is a relief for scripts like this.