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Comment by Foobar8568 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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

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