From: Todd Benson <caduceass@...>
Date: 2009-09-03T05:41:58+09:00
Subject: Re: start_with? Does someone need a grammar lesson?

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Dominik Honnef<dominikho@gmx.net> wrote:
> Todd Benson <caduceass@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Todd Benson<caduceass@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Nah, it's a common artifact of moving east asian grammar to western.
>>> Besides that, you shouldn't try to reinvent by changing the wheel.
>>> People obviously think that proper would be "a single object" "starts
>>> with".  But if you think of that simple object for what it is, a bunch
>>> of bytes, than the discrepancy goes away.  It's plural vs. singular.
>>> Don't really care.
>>
>> I didn't give an example.  My bad...
>>
>> things_that_are_important_to_me starts with "start"
>>
>> Todd
>
> I honestly rather like to explain this "artifact" by the fact what it
> is. A message sent to a receiver. You ask a receiver about its state,
> not the world around it. So "do you" actually makes more sense than
> asian/western grammar as an explanation, imho.

You might be right.  But in any case, I'm guessing at least 40% of
programmers use plurals instead of collective nouns (i.e. lions
instead of pride) -- especially in databases (90% plural morbidity
there) -- then the use of start_with makes perfect sense.  Whether it
really is a spoken language artifact or not is irrelevant, I guess, so
I apologize for bringing up that correlation.

Todd