Comment by tyleo 3 hours ago
I’d say overreaction.
The real world is full of tradeoffs and I’ve seen people try to get minutia like this correct in convoluted contexts which actually broke the core application logic.
Given the limited time we can spend on things, supporting proper plurality falls below some of my other UI priorities like proper accessibility settings.
I don’t think plurality is bad, just low in the stack rank of things that matter.
You'll have to look up the way i18n frameworks work, but no the "(s)" is not worse. It is far better because it's a simple string that the framework can substitute without embedded business logic trying to manipulate the individual characters in a way that only works in one language.
I agree; there's probably higher value UI work, or something that should be more important to you above this. Examples: Have you ever run your app at 500% in high contrast with no mouse or with a screen reader? What's the happy path for most popular workflows? How many layers bury them with options and edge cases? What language support are you missing?
I’d like to think I do pluralization right, but sometimes it’s just that bit too time consuming because of an awkward internationalization issue or something so I don’t. There’s only so much polishing you can (or should) do before you ship. If I found that my team suddenly had a lot of time for cleaning up this kind of thing, I’d start worrying about job security tbh.
Death by a thousand paper cuts
Proverbs become eerie the longer you live. Almost like, woah, that one sentence was actually universally true? Well hot damn!
Keep neglecting these small things and you’ll see the level of unconstrained shit you will have unleashed onto the world. With enough of us doing so, we can take part in the great collective festival of mass garbage accumulation (aggregate all the paper cuts). The few neurotic types that lament over this are actually, believe it or not, the closest thing to a sewage system for the accumulation. As of 2025, shame as a utility, is a weak tool.
The modern website needs to be in MOMA with no explanation, just a small title that reads ‘Despair’ (Perhaps even ‘Futility’, or the more modern ‘There was an attempt’).
If pluralisation of a status message in the UI is breaking core application logic then you've got bigger problems than the pluralisation code.