English lesson for DHH

Let me put it in a way you’ll understand, my gay Danish friend:

Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.uncountable 'staff'
end

That is all.

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2 Responses to “English lesson for DHH”

  1. Wincent Colaiuta Says:

    My English is a bit rusty, but I think “staff” is basically impossible to inflect correctly as it has two or three different meanings and each one pluralizes differently:

    staff (employee) -> staff (employees)

    staff (long stick) -> staffs (long sticks)

    And this one which is tricky because the singular can correctly be written as both “staff” and “stave”:

    staff (musical notation) -> staves

    BTW: glad to see you posting so much lately.

  2. Sho Says:

    staff (long stick) -> staffs (long sticks)

    I think it’s reasonable to expect anyone making a database tracking long sticks – perhaps a rental store catering to wizards – to override the somewhat more common “employees” uncountable usage. And it’s difficult to see how you could have a table for “staves” at all – what could possibly go in there?

    Anyway, point taken. DHH has as much as said he doesn’t want to go near the impossible task of making the inflector a comprehensive english pluraliser – much less other languages! But I just thought “staff” was such a common, obvious case it should be in there – you could possibly replace “sheep”.

    glad to see you posting so much lately

    Ha, posting so much *crap* you mean. Sadly, it’s nothing more than procrastination – if blog output is up, you’ll know for certain that work output is correspondingly down. C’est la, unfortunately, vie.

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