Don't Be Afraid of Special Cases

prog21.dadgum.com

6 pointsnickb5 comments

"...ugly is when a program displays "1 files deleted" (or even "1 file(s) deleted")..."

This bugs me sometimes also... or when a timer is counting down - I know it's small but it just seems lazy to leave off the half-line or whatever it takes to conditionally add the "s" when != 1

Human nature is human nature: people are lazy. Combine this with the norm that dense notation is evil ("file" + (n>1?'s':'')) and you're bound to lose special cases to apathy, here and there...

That bugs me too, but I write it anyway - all my code has to be localizable, and I'm not about to write that code for who-knows-how-many languages that I don't know. There are usually more important things. But it still bugs me - polish is important. :-/

Localizing that sort of things is super tricky as many languages use different words for if there is one, versus 2, versus 3-5, versus 5+, so you really have to localized 3 or 4 Strings, even though in English there's only two options. I found this out the hard way.

Joel Spolsky covered some of this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html

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