Number "two" in Polish (depending on context): dwa, dwoje, dwie, dwóch, dwiema, dwom, dwojga, dwojgu, dwójka, dwójki, dwójkę, dwójką, dwójce, dwójko So that's just my mother tongue. It think your problem is a bit more complex than (s).
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The kind of company I want to be a part of
31–40 of 180 posts
Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#32Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#33Wait before author finds out there're languages with more forms than singular and plural...
Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#34This 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.…
I am baffled why you are inserting good and evil into this. He just seems to want to work at companies that value craft and attention to detail. It just like the jobs quote about the back of the furniture also being attractive.
Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#35Could not agree more. As a child in the 80s I read a programming book (can't remember the name anymore unfortunately) where the reader was encouraged to write software that is always friendly and human when it comes to communicating with the user. For example, 'Please input a number:' instead of 'Input a number:'. But also exactly the thing the writer talks about in the article; do not be lazy when it comes to plural…
When you interacted with a 'computer' once or twice a week, perhaps... seeing "please" is ... neat? A 'wow' factor ("wow! It knows English!")?
Peppering input fields and forms and folksy welcoming language scattered thoughout might be useful now and then, but for systems where people are using it repeatedly hourly/daily/weekly... it's (at best) clutter and noise.
Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#36Number "two" in Polish (depending on context): dwa, dwoje, dwie, dwóch, dwiema, dwom, dwojga, dwojgu, dwójka, dwójki, dwójkę, dwójką, dwójce, dwójko So that's just my mother tongue. It think your problem is a bit more complex than (s).
I think it's more about inclination of the words that can't be replaced with a number.
In English, it's easy:
* 1 *file* sent
* 2 *files* sent
* 12 *files* sent
* 21 *files* sent
* 16,777,221 *files* sent.
Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#37I literally couldn't care less. You can call it '1th of April' for all that i care if the actual functionality you offer is clean and fast I'll gladly accept!
Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#38Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#39Always thought you kinda have to do this to create a product that can even be translated considering languages like French where plurals take many forms.
That was my first thought as well, but interfaces that take care of pluralization with an i18n framework can handle all of these.
It just takes longer and is at the expense of another feature. In truth, it mostly takes more skill - once you have that skill, it's another 5 minutes. There are a few edge cases, but you largely have the necessary context to translate a string. You have to translate the string in its entirety instead of relying on composition of translated chunks. (This is already best practice.)
Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of
#40For non-technical users, the user interface is the program. To them, there's nothing beneath the shell. My last boss didn't like Macs because his PowerPoint presentations rendered differently on them compared to Windows. There are millions of real people with consequential positions in important organisations who think like this.
Getting your program to render the same on different platforms takes a lot of work the user will never see, and that goes double if you actually want it to behave the same. There are some very deep problems you have to work through, like what behaving the same and rendering the same even mean. Same window decorations? Same menu layout? Same dialog boxes? How are you doing font rendering? How much do you embrace platform defaults versus steamrolling over them in the name of uniformity?