I thought for quite a while about whether to publish this article, and in the end, here it is…
I worked on it for a day and a half, and it still isn’t completely finished, but I’m already happy enough with it that I won’t be improving it any further – at least not for now. While writing the code, I completely changed the way it worked 3 times (each time it tended toward simplification – which I have known for a long time is the right direction).
In the end, I simplified it and shrank it by roughly 75%, and to my surprise, that turned out to be a bull’s-eye. I also made hundreds, even thousands, of small tweaks, but they were often almost mindless changes that caused more trouble than good. Only when I stopped and thought it through did I get closer to the functionality I was after. The biggest shortcoming is that the program looks only at the following verses and doesn’t care about what comes “before”.
So it may well happen that the verse of the day starts with a quotation mark or an opening parenthesis. What I cared about most was that parentheses, quotation marks and the like always get closed within the verses. Unfortunately, only now did I realize that I was always searching for just one character, even though I could have created bool variables for the individual characters to track whether I’m looking for their closing counterparts, and improved it that way with this simple approach.
You are surely also wondering why I’m not replying to any messages, but that’s because right now I’m going through a period when I don’t feel like talking to anyone. No exceptions. I’ve been geocaching quite a lot, but I don’t write about it anywhere and I don’t talk about it with anyone. I’m becoming more and more solitary and withdrawn, but what can you do, people like that exist too.
But if you’re eager to see my “lovely” verses, you can open a page that will always serve you 1 or more verses every time the page loads (although, judging by the heading “Verse of the Day“, it should rather refresh the verse every 24 hours): https://we-believe.sunamo.cz/en/bible .
If you want to control the number of verses, you can visit the page https://we-believe.sunamo.cz/en/bible/nahodne-verse , which isn’t linked from anywhere on the site.
And now I’m off into seclusion again…