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Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

(writewithharper.com)
645 points ReadCarlBarks | 1 comments | 20 Jun 25 19:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.3s | source
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tolerance ◴[21 Jun 25 03:52 UTC] No.44334333[source]▶
I would much rather check my writing against grammatical rules that are hard coded in an open source program—meaning that I can change them—than ones that I imagine would be subject to prompt fiddling or worse; implicitly hard coded in a tangle of training data that the LLM would draw from.

The Neovim configuration for the LSP looks neat: https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/neovim

The whole thing seems cool. Automattic should mention this on their homepage. Tools like this are the future of something.

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triknomeister ◴[21 Jun 25 07:24 UTC] No.44335438[source]▶
You would lose out on evolution of language.
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phoe-krk ◴[21 Jun 25 08:44 UTC] No.44335826[source]▶
Natural languages evolve so slowly that writing and editing rules for them is easily achievable even this way. Think years versus minutes.
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qwery ◴[21 Jun 25 09:31 UTC] No.44336057[source]▶
Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?
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phoe-krk ◴[21 Jun 25 09:54 UTC] No.44336169[source]▶
> Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly".

Languages are used to successfully communicate. To achieve this, all parties involved in the communication must know the language well enough to send and receive messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to explain to your parents the meaning of the current short-lived meme and fad nouns/adjectives like "skibidi ohio gyatt rizz".

It takes time for a language feature to become widespread and de-facto standardized among a population. This is because people need to asynchronously learn it, start using it themselves, and gain critical mass so that even people who do not like using that feature need to start respecting its presence. This inertia is the main source of slowness that I mention, and also and a requirement for any kind of grammar-checking software. From the point of such software, a language feature that (almost) nobody understands is not a language feature, but an error.

> You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?

Yes, that set of patterns is called a language grammar. Even dialects and slangs have grammars of their own, even if they're different, less popular, have less formal materials describing them, and/or aren't taught in schools.

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qwery ◴[21 Jun 25 11:30 UTC] No.44336671[source]▶
Fair enough, thanks for replying. I don't see the task of specifying a grammar as straightforward as you do, perhaps. I guess I just didn't understand the chain of comments.

I find that clear-cut, rigid rules tend to be the least helpful ones in writing. Obviously this class of rule is also easy/easier to represent in software, so it also tends to be the source of false positives and frustration that lead me to disable such features altogether.

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1. bombcar ◴[21 Jun 25 12:29 UTC] No.44337066[source]▶
Just because the rules aren’t set fully in stone, or can be bent or broken, doesn’t mean they don’t “exist” - perhaps not the way mathematical truths exist, but there’s something there.

Even these few posts follow innumerable “rules” which make it easier to (try) to communicate.

Perhaps what you’re angling against is where rules of language get set it stone and fossilized until the “Official” language is so diverged from the “vulgar tongue” that it’s incomprehensibly different.

Like church/legal Latin compared to Italian, perhaps. (Fun fact - the Vulgate translation of the Bible was INTO the vulgar tongue at the time: Latin).