6 ms·

Thanks. Grammar check - its note "codes"; it is "code".

klodolph 6y ago
Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.
- krapht 6y ago
  It's also, for some reason, what people say in scientific computing.
- senkora 6y ago
  Is it like fish and fishes? fish = plural for many of a single kind of fish fishes = plural for multiple kinds of fish So by analogy: code = any amount of code from a single project codes = plural for code from multiple projects I'm American and this is how I use code/codes, so I'm curious whether you make the same distinction, or if you always use codes.
  - andybak 6y ago
    Brit here. It's always "code" and "codes" sounds like something a non-technical middle manager would say and get sniggered about behind his back.
  - eloisius 6y ago
    Sounds like saying “the sands from beaches around Florida” to pluralize code to me. How much is a single code?
  - klodolph 6y ago
    I’m American, this is just my take on it. I don’t think fish / fishes is quite right. Look up “code” in the dictionary and you get at least two different senses of the word: 1. System of substituting letters/words/symbols/etc. for letters/words/symbols/etc, e.g. “morse code”. Countable noun. 2. Computing program instructions. Uncountable noun. This is not like fish / fishes, because “fish” is countable—I can have one fish or two fish. When talking about computer programming instructions, I cannot have one code or two codes, but I can have one line of code or two lines of code. Just like I cannot have a bowl of one thousand rice, but I can have a bowl of one thousand grains of rice. Rice is “uncountable” in the grammatical sense even though it seems like you should be able to count it. In Indian english, my understanding is that for the second sense above, “codes” is correct and “code” is incorrect. In that sense it is probably similar to “data”, in the historical usage where “data” was plural (in modern usage, “data” is often considered singular). So, “The codes are on my hard drive.” makes sense to Indian english speakers, and “The data are on my hard drive.” makes sense in historical (say, early 20th-century) English. There is a singular version of data, “datum”, but rarely used.
    - BossingAround 6y ago
      "When referring to more than one species of fish, especially in a scientific context, you can use fishes as the plural." [1] It's the same as peoples... [2] [1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/fish-fishes/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/fish-fishes/ [2] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/persons-people-peoples/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/persons-people-peoples/
      - klodolph 6y ago
        That’s a different sense of the word “fish”.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    It's closer to how some dialects of English will say "Do you want to come with?" and consider that a complete sentence. FWIW, there is no harm in the correction. "codes" is correct in Indian English, Indian English is a variant just as much as Australian English is, and people abroad will auto-bucket you as less intelligent than someone speaking more common forms. So it is still a smart action to switch yourself to the more common forms.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result, the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper English" or "correct English". If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British Council, and teach British English. If you go to China and a lot of Asian countries, a lot of their textbooks come from the USA, and will teach American English. You might find some Aussie textbooks in Japan or China... You will not find a country that speaks Indian English outside of India. So, "color" or "colour" are both correct because they are correct in one of the "standards" of English. "Codes" then is not correct because it is incorrect in what's considered the "standards" of English. For the record, I personally am from neither US, UK, or any other English-speaking country. I also think correcting people's English on HNews is silly. Just my 2c.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Textbooks for French teach Parisian French, the kind standardized by the Académie française. Does this mean that Québécois is wrong? Does this mean that when the Swiss say “septante” we should correct them and say “Ce n’est pas septante, c’est soixante-dix.” The fact that we teach French according to the Académie française and teach Spanish according to the Real Academia Española is just due to the political power of those institutions, as any linguist will tell you. These divisions, that American English and British English are “standard” and other versions of English are “non-standard” are based in colonial sensibilities and steeped in racism—the same reasons why AAVE is seen as inferior, or Haitian Creole.
  - ivalm 6y ago
    Except there are over a billion Indians, which is more than all of Europe+US combined. They are a standard onto themselves. There are more Indian English speakers than British English speakers.
  - jkaplowitz 6y ago
    I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself. Are you going to claim that Canada uses nonstandard English simply because it's a hybrid of US and UK English with a few phonetic and lexical twists of its own? Or that Scottish English is somehow less legitimate than England's English (the two are quite different) despite Scotland being part of the UK for centuries? As well, Indian English is spoken by an estimated 125 million people, more people than the total populations of the UK and Canada combined and about a third of the US population. And this is the predominant version of English in a country of more than a billion people, which makes it standard enough there to count as a standard. Deferring to a standard requires a context in which to say whether one is or isn't speaking standardly. Since we're discussing a topic about India on a US-centric but globally inclusive website, either we should insist that everyone uses the site's predominant US variety of English (I'm happy we don't do this) or the Indian commenter should be free to use standard Indian English in discussing this without that dialect being called wrong.
- marmaduke 6y ago
  I think either is ok depending on your intention: codes is to suggest the stuff is plural, countable etc, e.g. you have a Bash script, Makefile and Java project (full of files), this is a set of heterogeneous countable things, hence codes. Code is a "mass noun" implying countability or cardinality is irrelevant, e.g. push the code to github. That said I always remarked Indians says "maths" where I would say "math", and I figured there must be some cross-language transfer going on from Hindi or other languages which use plural for intellectual property </wild guess>
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Indian English has “maths” because it is closely related to British English, which also uses “maths”.
  - jkaplowitz 6y ago
    UK English also uses plural for maths.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    The full name of the subject is "mathematics"; a plural. "Maths" is a logical shortening of it. "Math" is actually weird.
- wbl 6y ago
  And in the HPC world.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  There are quirks to speaking with developers or workers in India who haven't also been trained partly in the US or Europe. A scattered assortment of unusual phrases or idiosyncrasies you may hear: -- "please revert at the earliest" -- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard -- A tendency to use abbreviations or acronyms which are not commonly understood, even by the direct team. E.g. "please excuse the IVR not working properly today" as if everyone is familiar with that abbreviation for the phone mail system. There are other more amusing quirks to I'll try to remember and post. Such as, "do the needful". And not working on state holidays, aka Tuesdays.
  - owenmarshall 6y ago
    I once was late for a meeting because it was "preponed" – I heard "we are ...ing the meeting" and assumed it was going be pushed to a later date. Not even angry. It's a great word.
  - jkaplowitz 6y ago
    Do the needful is such an awesome expression! I wish it were standard worldwide. I enjoy it a lot more than "do what's needed" or "do what you need."
  - Arnavion 6y ago
    >-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard To be clear, India does not use a 10000 grouping system; that's China's and Japan's system. India's system is that the first group is three digits, and subsequent ones are two digits. eg 10^9 is 1,00,00,00,000
  - GolDDranks 6y ago
    I work as a Software Engineer in Japan. We have a lot of "non-standard" abbreviations and phrasings too. Here's a few that come to mind: MTG = meeting MGR = manager DL = download expressing dates without separators: 2020/07/25 becomes 20200725 (of course, this is alwais in the Japanese field order which I find the most sensible one)
- concordDance 6y ago
  The great grandparent's post is more difficult to read than it otherwise would be to the vast majority of HN users who use other English dialects. American, Australian, German, British, etc. English are all mutually intelligible with no difficulty, while the... *counts... 11 deviations from the more common (as determined by looking at HN posters) grammars in the great grandparent require a bit of work on the part or the reader.
- random314 6y ago
  Most of the time Indian developers are working with American or European clients. I have seen multiple situations where non Indians make fun of and devalue contributions by Indian developers because they use phrases like codes , needful and revert. Just avoid using these phrases. There are other battles to fight.
- nogridbag 6y ago
  I first came across this about 20 years ago when I was learning Java. There was no StackOverflow. Sun's Java forum (java.net?) was the place to go for beginners. I clicked into a thread "How to Send SMS" that had thousands of replies spanning several years and every reply had almost the same format: "please send the codes!!! some@email.com" All with Indian names and emails. I was pretty naive about the world then so I assumed it was some joke I was missing. I would check in every year or so and the thread kept growing until the forum was shut down when Oracle acquired Sun. I didn't realize until later that these were all university students doing the same Java SMS project year after year. There was some blog post years later about that epic thread but I doubt it's been archived.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942095.

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

krapht 6y ago
It's also, for some reason, what people say in scientific computing.
senkora 6y ago
Is it like fish and fishes? fish = plural for many of a single kind of fish fishes = plural for multiple kinds of fish So by analogy: code = any amount of code from a single project codes = plural for code from multiple projects I'm American and this is how I use code/codes, so I'm curious whether you make the same distinction, or if you always use codes.
- andybak 6y ago
  Brit here. It's always "code" and "codes" sounds like something a non-technical middle manager would say and get sniggered about behind his back.
- eloisius 6y ago
  Sounds like saying “the sands from beaches around Florida” to pluralize code to me. How much is a single code?
- klodolph 6y ago
  I’m American, this is just my take on it. I don’t think fish / fishes is quite right. Look up “code” in the dictionary and you get at least two different senses of the word: 1. System of substituting letters/words/symbols/etc. for letters/words/symbols/etc, e.g. “morse code”. Countable noun. 2. Computing program instructions. Uncountable noun. This is not like fish / fishes, because “fish” is countable—I can have one fish or two fish. When talking about computer programming instructions, I cannot have one code or two codes, but I can have one line of code or two lines of code. Just like I cannot have a bowl of one thousand rice, but I can have a bowl of one thousand grains of rice. Rice is “uncountable” in the grammatical sense even though it seems like you should be able to count it. In Indian english, my understanding is that for the second sense above, “codes” is correct and “code” is incorrect. In that sense it is probably similar to “data”, in the historical usage where “data” was plural (in modern usage, “data” is often considered singular). So, “The codes are on my hard drive.” makes sense to Indian english speakers, and “The data are on my hard drive.” makes sense in historical (say, early 20th-century) English. There is a singular version of data, “datum”, but rarely used.
  - BossingAround 6y ago
    "When referring to more than one species of fish, especially in a scientific context, you can use fishes as the plural." [1] It's the same as peoples... [2] [1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/fish-fishes/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/fish-fishes/ [2] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/persons-people-peoples/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/persons-people-peoples/
    - klodolph 6y ago
      That’s a different sense of the word “fish”.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  It's closer to how some dialects of English will say "Do you want to come with?" and consider that a complete sentence. FWIW, there is no harm in the correction. "codes" is correct in Indian English, Indian English is a variant just as much as Australian English is, and people abroad will auto-bucket you as less intelligent than someone speaking more common forms. So it is still a smart action to switch yourself to the more common forms.
BossingAround 6y ago
While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result, the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper English" or "correct English". If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British Council, and teach British English. If you go to China and a lot of Asian countries, a lot of their textbooks come from the USA, and will teach American English. You might find some Aussie textbooks in Japan or China... You will not find a country that speaks Indian English outside of India. So, "color" or "colour" are both correct because they are correct in one of the "standards" of English. "Codes" then is not correct because it is incorrect in what's considered the "standards" of English. For the record, I personally am from neither US, UK, or any other English-speaking country. I also think correcting people's English on HNews is silly. Just my 2c.
- klodolph 6y ago
  Textbooks for French teach Parisian French, the kind standardized by the Académie française. Does this mean that Québécois is wrong? Does this mean that when the Swiss say “septante” we should correct them and say “Ce n’est pas septante, c’est soixante-dix.” The fact that we teach French according to the Académie française and teach Spanish according to the Real Academia Española is just due to the political power of those institutions, as any linguist will tell you. These divisions, that American English and British English are “standard” and other versions of English are “non-standard” are based in colonial sensibilities and steeped in racism—the same reasons why AAVE is seen as inferior, or Haitian Creole.
- ivalm 6y ago
  Except there are over a billion Indians, which is more than all of Europe+US combined. They are a standard onto themselves. There are more Indian English speakers than British English speakers.
- jkaplowitz 6y ago
  I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself. Are you going to claim that Canada uses nonstandard English simply because it's a hybrid of US and UK English with a few phonetic and lexical twists of its own? Or that Scottish English is somehow less legitimate than England's English (the two are quite different) despite Scotland being part of the UK for centuries? As well, Indian English is spoken by an estimated 125 million people, more people than the total populations of the UK and Canada combined and about a third of the US population. And this is the predominant version of English in a country of more than a billion people, which makes it standard enough there to count as a standard. Deferring to a standard requires a context in which to say whether one is or isn't speaking standardly. Since we're discussing a topic about India on a US-centric but globally inclusive website, either we should insist that everyone uses the site's predominant US variety of English (I'm happy we don't do this) or the Indian commenter should be free to use standard Indian English in discussing this without that dialect being called wrong.
marmaduke 6y ago
I think either is ok depending on your intention: codes is to suggest the stuff is plural, countable etc, e.g. you have a Bash script, Makefile and Java project (full of files), this is a set of heterogeneous countable things, hence codes. Code is a "mass noun" implying countability or cardinality is irrelevant, e.g. push the code to github. That said I always remarked Indians says "maths" where I would say "math", and I figured there must be some cross-language transfer going on from Hindi or other languages which use plural for intellectual property </wild guess>
- klodolph 6y ago
  Indian English has “maths” because it is closely related to British English, which also uses “maths”.
- jkaplowitz 6y ago
  UK English also uses plural for maths.
- triceratops 6y ago
  The full name of the subject is "mathematics"; a plural. "Maths" is a logical shortening of it. "Math" is actually weird.
wbl 6y ago
And in the HPC world.
supernova87a 6y ago
There are quirks to speaking with developers or workers in India who haven't also been trained partly in the US or Europe. A scattered assortment of unusual phrases or idiosyncrasies you may hear: -- "please revert at the earliest" -- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard -- A tendency to use abbreviations or acronyms which are not commonly understood, even by the direct team. E.g. "please excuse the IVR not working properly today" as if everyone is familiar with that abbreviation for the phone mail system. There are other more amusing quirks to I'll try to remember and post. Such as, "do the needful". And not working on state holidays, aka Tuesdays.
- owenmarshall 6y ago
  I once was late for a meeting because it was "preponed" – I heard "we are ...ing the meeting" and assumed it was going be pushed to a later date. Not even angry. It's a great word.
- jkaplowitz 6y ago
  Do the needful is such an awesome expression! I wish it were standard worldwide. I enjoy it a lot more than "do what's needed" or "do what you need."
- Arnavion 6y ago
  >-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard To be clear, India does not use a 10000 grouping system; that's China's and Japan's system. India's system is that the first group is three digits, and subsequent ones are two digits. eg 10^9 is 1,00,00,00,000
- GolDDranks 6y ago
  I work as a Software Engineer in Japan. We have a lot of "non-standard" abbreviations and phrasings too. Here's a few that come to mind: MTG = meeting MGR = manager DL = download expressing dates without separators: 2020/07/25 becomes 20200725 (of course, this is alwais in the Japanese field order which I find the most sensible one)
concordDance 6y ago
The great grandparent's post is more difficult to read than it otherwise would be to the vast majority of HN users who use other English dialects. American, Australian, German, British, etc. English are all mutually intelligible with no difficulty, while the... *counts... 11 deviations from the more common (as determined by looking at HN posters) grammars in the great grandparent require a bit of work on the part or the reader.
random314 6y ago
Most of the time Indian developers are working with American or European clients. I have seen multiple situations where non Indians make fun of and devalue contributions by Indian developers because they use phrases like codes , needful and revert. Just avoid using these phrases. There are other battles to fight.
nogridbag 6y ago
I first came across this about 20 years ago when I was learning Java. There was no StackOverflow. Sun's Java forum (java.net?) was the place to go for beginners. I clicked into a thread "How to Send SMS" that had thousands of replies spanning several years and every reply had almost the same format: "please send the codes!!! some@email.com" All with Indian names and emails. I was pretty naive about the world then so I assumed it was some joke I was missing. I would check in every year or so and the thread kept growing until the forum was shut down when Oracle acquired Sun. I didn't realize until later that these were all university students doing the same Java SMS project year after year. There was some blog post years later about that epic thread but I doubt it's been archived.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942095.