Parenthesis s

It wasn’t long after I started programming that I developed a pet peeve with other programmers who don’t feel the user is worth the time to put an extra “if” statement into their code. Here’s an example: “There were 5 result(s) for your search.” Obviously it’s a trivial matter to check if there was indeed just 1 result or some other number of results, and leave the “s” off or not. The “(s)” annoys the hell out of me, and I think it is distracting for most users as well.

Tonight I saw something that tops even that. The web folks over at Tripod Blogs display this bit of brilliance under a blog entry:

no comments

In other words, they took the time to put “no” instead of “0”, but left the “(s)” anyway.

Manton Reece @manton