Would a compound acronym translator be useful?

[beechnut]

Background Information

I wrote a small Ruby script to help me translate compound acronyms from my project's partner agencies.

For example:

Agency.translate("B&F-ASC, RACA")
=> "Budget & Finance, Reimbursable and Advanced Collection Agreement, Albuquerque Service Center"

I'm imagining this could be a useful Slackbot addition, looking something like: define <agency-acronym> <acronym(s)>, e.g. define USFS B&F-ASC RACA.

We could have a folder of YAML files that define acronyms for each agency, and having the agency acronym as the first input lets us scope the lookup more precisely.

Questions: Would this be a useful addition to the define command? If so, is the usefulness of this idea worth the effort?

[julialeague]

I think it'd be useful! It reminds me of Department of Veterans Affairs' WTF Bot, where you can enter /wtf VASC, for instance, and it'll spit out what that acronym stands for. It's been extremely helpful for me while working with them, and I'm sure a GSA equivalent would be widely utilized. Let me know if you want any help with this, as I enjoy Ruby myself.

[geekygirlsarah]

As a fairly recent new person here, yeah!

I've been meaning to dig into this bot a bit to see how it works, I could maybe work on adding this unless someone else wants to (or Greg's already done it)

[beechnut]

@julialeague Thanks for the feedback! Do you know if it's possible to write Ruby in this context? Looks like all of the scripts are TypeScript.

@geekygirlsarah Thanks for that feedback! I don't think anyone has done it yet. There's a decent overall single-acronym bot, but an agency-specific compound acronym bot would probably require a little bit of lexing & parsing (that's how my Ruby script works, anyway) and a more complex lookup.

[mgwalker]

This would be such a great addition.

[mgwalker]

@beechnut Is this something you're still interested in fiddling with sometime? (Not asking for a commitment to do anything, just curious.)

[beechnut]

@mgwalker Thanks for asking, but no, not in the foreseeable future