I’m bringing this up, because below, I talked about the population issue. And this program has become incredibly useful to me, in generating “real looking” test data. In either normal random record length, data terminated with a line feed, on Linux… or fixed length records, common on IBM mainframes. There was a time I would try and manually build records and think up names like Mickey Mouse and Herman Munster, and it wasn’t long before I ran out of ideas. It was very tedious!
According to comments in my Python program, I started writing this in Python 2 in 2014. Later in 2018, I rewrote it Julia for speed improvements. Then it appears I converted my Python 2 program to Python 3 and added the mimesis package in 2020 for a huge speed improvement.
I almost didn’t find the program using grep, in my Python directory, because I was searching for “*mimesis*” (which works for find) and not “mimesis”., I just needed to add the ‘-E’ switch!