I work for an organization that does a lot of work with government data. We have a couple of different projects where we’ve abstracted out common text search/manipulation operations into reusable libraries, for things like standardizing the way politicians’ names are displayed (e.g., transforming “MCDONALD, BOB (R-VA)” into “Bob McDonald (R-VA)”), or finding legal citations in text (e.g., finding a reference to (e.g., finding occurrences of things like “1 U.S.C. 7” in text, determining that it’s a US Code citation, and returning a structure that says it’s referring to section 1 of title 7). These are relatively simple operations, and lots of collaborators in our space would like to use them, but we end up having to pick a language in which to implement each (the former is in Python; the latter, Javascript), and we freeze out potential consumers/contributors who work in different languages and don’t want to resort to hacks like shelling out to a node process to handle their text. This all seems like a shame because what we’re expressing is so simple, and ought, one would think, to be pretty easy to share.