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The kind of company I want to be a part of

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Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#101

Post by jordanb »

CalRobert wrote: post #99
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, your comment probably exemplifies the “Californian Ideology” the parent comment is criticizing. “Why would you consider good or evil when talking about how you want to spend the overwhelming majority of your productive life”.

I miss when Californian ideology was of the “information wants to be free” and “connecting the people of the world will end tyranny” variety :-( . Something really changed after the first dotcom bubble. Maybe it was my own youthful naïveté (as someone living in Sacramento desperately wishing I lived in that much cooler city to the west). Maybe it was the last drops of that wave Hunter S Thompson talked about breaking…

"Information wants to be free" was always a pretty marginal part of the California Ideology[0].

The main difference between now and thirty years ago, is that now they're only "anti-statist" when the state tries to control them personally. They're pro-state when it's being inflicted on their perceived enemies or underlings.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#102

Post by danans »

abraxas wrote: post #67
nickelcitymario wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy moly, and I thought French (my mother tongue) was complicated due to conjugation. I'm fascinated by what possible context could call for this many variations on how you spell/pronounce a number. Any chance you know of a good article on this? (I could ask ChatGPT, but I'm trying to let go of that crutch.)

I'm not a linguist so I can't send any articles that explain the origins of this mess. But here are actual examples of usage: dwa ptaki (two birds) dwoje ludzi (two persons) dwie dziewczyny (two girls) idę z dwiema dziewczynami (I'm walking with two girls) dałem kwiaty dwom dziewczynom (I gave flowers to two girls) kanapa dla dwojga (a sofa for two - gender unspecified) dałem śniadanie dwojgu (I served breakfast for…

> I'm not a linguist so I can't send any articles that explain the origins of this mess.

It's probably because Polish, unlike English and most Western European languages, has a case system (where nouns are modified to indicate their function, i.e subject, object, instrument, etc).

That's a pretty common feature in grammatically conservative Indo-European languages. Other living Indo-European languages, like Lithuanian, are even more conservative and have preserved nearly the entire case system of their ancestor.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#103

Post by WorldMaker »

wavemode wrote: post #63
jordanb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll have to look up the way i18n frameworks work, but no the "(s)" is not worse. It is far better because it's a simple string that the framework can substitute without embedded business logic trying to manipulate the individual characters in a way that only works in one language.

Huh? "(s)", itself, only works in one language! Other languages (and even English, sometimes) don't always pluralize by appending lettters to the end of words, so the parenthesized suffix thing very regularly doesn't even work. And who exactly is talking about "embedding" business logic in the i18n framework? Every serious framework I've used has supported placeholders, so at the application level you just select bet…

Your example is still hard-coding just the two plural categories of English "one" and "other".

These days many i18n frameworks do need to embed some business logic, even if it is mostly fun things like the CLDR plural categories: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/48/supplemental/language...

Mozilla's Fluent, for example is designed for maximal i18n support of plural selectors and other such things i18n needs: https://projectfluent.org/

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#104

Post by rdiddly »

jordanb wrote: post #22

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words.…

1) You projected that anticipated focus into the title. Not wrongly. But I for example did not. My slant was more about innovation. The title doesn't inherently imply or contain either one.

2) The small, practical thing the post is actually about does address at least part of what you wanted to hear, because declaring "Loading 1 item(s)" IS hostile to users.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#106

Post by WorldMaker »

strickjb9 wrote: post #52

I know this is besides the point but translation libraries are perfect for this even if you aren't creating a multilingual site. You define your singular/plural forms in one place.

There's an old proverb that the best time to add i18n support is today. It takes a bit of extra effort to build new stuff with it in mind, but that little bit of extra effort today goes a long way (and builds good habits) versus the large projects to add it tomorrow when it becomes tech debt and needs a full audit of every possible way a string might be formed for display to a user, because you just got a client/customer who needs it tomorrow.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#107

Post by ricardo81 »

OhNoHereWeGo wrote: post #85

The essence of this post is about craftsmanship, value, and caring about what you're doing. It's really hard to put this into words. There's certainly a gradient and trade-offs to be made. In most businesses, the priority is to make money. This is not bad. Business owners deserve to make money for their efforts. It's always been the case that "bean counters" will optimize to increase profits. If you want a superior p…

agreed. we interact with so many different types of software and I presume like me, we designate a confidence score of how things will work out because there's so many unknown quantities out there. Those little thoughts you have while an app/page is doing what it's doing, wondering whether it even works as it says in the first place.

I place value on grammar but appreciate in the web today that surely around half of English words in it are ESL (while ignoring AI). And that's fine, it's a human thing- not everyone was taught English or has known it a long time, or has dyslexia etc etc.

I guess in the end, allow end users to have full confidence in you in all ways possible.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#108

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jordanb wrote: post #22

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words.…

What I do, is have two different formats in the translation tokens.

As an example, this app[0], is currently only localized in English, but I still use tokens, whenever I do apps, so the base localization[1] has stuff like this:

    "SLUG-CLEANTIME-DIVIDER"                        =   "\nThis is ";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR-EXACT"              =   "exactly one year.";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS-EXACT"             =   "exactly %d years.";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR"                    =   "one year";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS"                   =   "%d years";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTH"                   =   "one month";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTHS"                  =   "%d months";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAY"                     =   "one day";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAYS"                    =   "%d days";
Which is actually composed in this dependency[2].

It's not perfect, but is pretty flexible.

Silly stuff, I know, and the app is not exactly a viral sensation, but the folks that use it, like it.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nacc/id452299196

[1] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/NACC/blob/master/Sources...

[2] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_UICleantime/blob/mas...

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#109

Post by ang_cire »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #26
shermantanktop wrote: post #10

This is the brown m&m theory. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale... A trivial, superficial fact is assumed to be indicative of a much more substantial concern. For Van Halen, the candy dish indicated adherence to contract terms; here, pluralization indicates the integrity and values of an entire company. It’s a cute idea that suggests an easy way to understand something complex. But there’s…

Van Halen was playing giant stadium shows that were massive logistical and coordination challenges and used this contract language as a canary for more important aspects like the scafolding setup. If they didn't read the catering closely, did they also skim the electrical schematics? Their concerts were perfect scenarios for heavy-weight process, defined procedures and scientific management. A lot of software is punk…

> If they didn't read the catering closely, did they also skim the electrical schematics?

This is dumb pop-psych stuff, like the "make interview candidates wait then reject them if they don't know the other candidates' names" type hiring "tricks". It's barely different than judging someone based on their handshake grip strength, imo.

Perhaps these companies prioritized the work properly, and determined that electrical work and scaffolding- both things that could kill people- were more important than M&Ms.

> If you don't release until your pluralization is perfect you've waited too long.

But I put making sure the pluralization was perfect in there to see if you're the kind of people who pay attention to detail! ;P

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#110

Post by ctxc »

jordanb wrote: post #22

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words.…

(author) I can assure you my intentions were much less sinister (and simpler ;))
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