If you look over my shoulder as I process stuff into my Zettelkasten, dear programmer friend, you may read along and then scream in terror: How can you pick such a title? It’s clear as day that this won’t be good for long! Just think of … and … to realize that the title needs to be improved! Programmers worth their salt are notorious to focus on edge cases, much to the dismay of non-programmers around them, who fail to see the relevance to be that accurate and all-encompassing when it comes to everyday things. Sorry: That’s part of our job, that’s a reflex you won’t get us to unlearn.

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Back in January when I drafted this post, I had just discovered Apple’s NaturalLanguage.framework. I still don’t know how powerful it really is, but it’s useful for a very simple task already: Counting words. In English and German, I can get pretty accurate results with a String.split at punctuation marks and whitespace. In French, you will get skewed results because these nices folks decided to put whitespace between quotation marks and quoted text.

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