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  > LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500.

"Any codes"?

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At least my comment hasn't been reviewed or written by a LLM.

And in my French brain, code or codebase is countable and not uncountable.

I guess you can guide it to write in any style.

But what set me off is an universal qualifier: there was no code seen by you that is of equal quality or better that what LLMs generate.

cows are brown, from one side.

https://www.neatorama.com/2007/01/22/a-mathematical-cow-joke...

I got curious and had to fire up the ol LLM to find out what the story is about the words that aren't pluralized - TIL about countable and uncountable nouns. I wonder if the guy giving you trouble about your English speaks French.

I speak Russian and some English, but the question was about universal quantification: author declares that LLMs generate code of better quality than "any codes" he seen in his career.

LLMs got their training data from somewhere. But maybe they’re good at percolating the good code to the top and filtering the bad code.

I'm native French and nobody would consider code countable. "codes" makes no sense. We'd talk about "lines of code" as a countable in French just like in English.

Codes is a proper grammatical word in English, but we don’t use it in reference to general computer programming.

You can for example have two different organizations with different codes of conduct.

There is though nothing technically wrong with seeing each line of code as an complete individual code and referring to then multiple of them as codes.

Codes can be synonymous with codebases and is grammatically just fine, though probably not the most common usage.

As far as I've ever heard, "le code" used in a codebase is uncountable, like "le café" you'd put in a cup, so we would still say "meilleur que tout le code que j'ai vu en 20 ans" and not "meilleur que tous les codes que j'ai vus en 20 ans".

There is a countable "code" (just like "un café" is either a place, or a cup of coffee, or a type of coffee), and "un code" would be the one used as a password or secret, as in "j'ai utilisé tous les codes de récupération et perdu mon accès Gmail" (I used all the recovery codes and lost Gmail access).

You are correct, we generally say le code. To be exact at that time, I was more thinking toutes les lignes de code.

> As far as I've ever heard, "le code" used in a codebase is uncountable

Now I can't get the Pulp Fuction dialog out of my head.

- Do you know what they call code in France?

- No

- Le code

As an additional wrinkle, the word seems quite French in origin in this case.

Quite sure they're not criticizing your grammar, but your substance.

You'll find, at times, that those communicating in a language that's not their primary language will tend to deviate from what one whose it was their primary language might expect.

If that's obvious to you than you're just being rude. If it's not obvious to you, then you'll also find this is a common deviance (plural 'code') from those who come from a particular primary language's region.

Edit; This got me thinking - what is the grammar/rule around what gets pluralized and what doesn't? How does one know that "code" can refer to a single line of code, a whole file of code, a project, or even the entirety of all code your eyes have ever seen without having to have an s tacked on to the end of it?

"Codes" as a way to refer to programs/libraries is actually common usage in academia and scientific programming, even by native English speakers. I believe, but am not sure, that it may just be relatively old jargon, before the use of "programs" became more common in the industry.

As for the grammar rule, it's the question of whether a word is countable or uncountable. In common industry usage, "code" is an uncountable noun, just like "flour" in cooking (you say 2 lines of code, 1 pound of flour).

It's actually pretty common for the same word to have both countable and uncountable versions, with different, though related, meanings. Typically the uncountable version is used with a measure of quantity, while the countable version denotes different kinds (flours - different types of flour; peoples - different groups of people).

> Typically the uncountable version is used with a measure of quantity, while the countable version denotes different kinds (flours - different types of flour; peoples - different groups of people).

This was very helpful, thank you! (I had just gotten off the phone with Claude learning about countable and uncountable nouns but those additional details you provided should prove quite valuable)

The question was about universal quantification, not grammar error.

As if author of the comment had not seen any code that is better or of equal quality of code generated by LLMs.

Well now I look like an idiot. But I did learn some things! :D My apologies.

> what is the grammar/rule around what gets pluralized and what doesn't? How does one know that "code" can refer to a single line of code, a whole file of code, a project, or even the entirety of all code your eyes have ever seen without having to have an s tacked on to the end of it?

Well, the grammar is that English has two different classes of noun, and any given noun belongs to one class or the other. Standard terminology calls them "mass nouns" and "count nouns".

The distinction is so deeply embedded in the language that it requires agreement from surrounding words; you might compare many [which can only apply to count nouns] vs much [only to mass nouns], or observe that there are separate generic nouns for each class [thing is the generic count noun; stuff is the generic mass noun].

For "how does one know", the general concept is that count nouns refer to things that occur discretely, and mass nouns refer to things that are indivisible or continuous, most prototypically materials like water, mud, paper, or steel.

Where the class of a noun is not fixed by common use (for example, if you're making it up, or if it's very rare), a speaker will assign it to one class or the other based on how they internally conceive of whatever they're referring to.

For the sake of completeness, I should mention that mass nouns, as a matter of grammar, do not and cannot have plural forms.

FWIW, I've noticed that scientists (native English speakers at least) will say "codes" rather "code". I don't know if this is universal or just specific domains (physics) nor if this is common or rare, but I've noticed it.

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