In which I contemplate an old project

I have been attempting to learn Java, in some vague and undefined way, because the company is looking to the possibility of moving to more modern technologies, because it would be useful to have some broader professional skills, and because learning things is always cool. Like many things that are done in a vague and undefined way, I did a whole bunch in a great rush of enthusiasm and then other things got in the way and I ceased having the time to work on it.

But while I was in that rush of enthusiasm, I set myself a project. Nothing too fancy, just reading an input file and choosing a line at random to output. Like so:

If you can't read it, it says: You totally know how to code in Java!

A little silly, perhaps, but it was a good way of practising working with files, building array lists, working with individual rows in the array list, and even messing around with interfaces using Swing. It was cute, and I was pleased with it.

I had vague thoughts of turning it into an Android app, just to play with making an app rather than because I thought it was something the world needed. Though it would have been fun to have it on my own phone. But instead I got distracted by a friend challenging me to have it generate the encouraging phrases at random, using separate files of different sentence components.

I achieved that, but not in a way that felt satisfying. The encouraging phrases were all too similar, restricted by the need to start from pieces that could work with any other piece. It felt flat, and less encouraging than the original. Maybe that's a failure on my part, either failing to feed it sufficiently interesting components or failing to code it in a sufficiently flexible way. The possibility certainly niggles at me.

So, as and when I finally come back to this instead of putting it off in favour of editing (Words of Power is officially into its second draft now!) or crocheting or Pokemon (Ultra Moon, right now), do I go back to the app idea or do I work on trying to improve the text generator? My feeling is that the app is closer to the idea that got me excited in the first place, but maybe the text generator would be more of a challenge. And I do love me a good challenge...